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IPFS News Link • Iraq

16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

• https://www.rollingstone.com, By MATT TAIBBI

Excerpted from Hate Inc., which can be found in serial form at Taibbi.substack.com.

Sixteen years ago this week, the United States invaded Iraq. We went in on an unconvincing excuse, articulated by George W. Bush in a speech days before invasion:

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people."

To the lie about the possession of WMDs, Bush added a few more: that Hussein "trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda." Moreover, left unchecked, those Saddam-supplied terrorists could "kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country."

The disaster that followed cost over a hundred-thousand lives just in Iraq and drained north of $2 trillion from the budget. Once we were in and the "most lethal weapons ever devised" were not discovered, it quickly became obvious that large numbers of people at the highest levels of society had either lied, screwed up, or both.


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