Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.

The U.S. military's first and only study looking into ties between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda showed no connection between the two, according to a military report released by the Pentagon.

Hundreds of false statements on WMDs, al-Qaida used to justify Iraq war

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

WHAT ARE national leaders to do when they want to thoroughly discredit another country or mount an attack when a provocation is lacking? "Casus belli" is defined in my dictionary as (1) "an event or combination of events which is a cause of war, or (2) may be alleged as a justification of war." So the time-honored answer is: If you don't have a casus belli, go for option 2 and invent one.

Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks. The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.

The Iraq Survey Group released its long awaited report and amongst its findings was that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them. Iraq's WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.

As George W. Bush has lately shown, the tactic of successfully defining your opponent is to political conflict what occupying the high ground is to waging war. The Bush-Cheney campaign has gleefully labeled John Kerry a flip-flopper. But what of Bush-Cheney flip-flops? They're getting a lot less ink, but America is paying a price in blood.

year after the invasion of Iraq, it's now clear we were led into war under false pretenses. Contrary to the Bush administration's claims, Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and Saddam was not involved in 9/11 or tied to al-Qaida.

A closer look at the record shows that Bush administration used the phrase "imminent threat" – while also using the synonymous phrases "mortal threat," "urgent threat," "immediate threat", "serious and mounting threat", "unique threat," and claiming that Iraq was actively seeking to "strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction" – all just months after Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that Iraq was "contained" and "threatens not the United States." While Iraq was certainly a dangerous country, the Admin...

Conservative Pat Buchanan critiques Cheney's arguments for going to war with Iraq one by one stating that "Cheney's arguments do appear to contradict Cold War history and common sense". Examples include: "If Saddam is a "mortal threat" to the United States, is he not a mortal threat to Israel next door? Yet tiny Israel seems less alarmed than Cheney and has not launched a pre-emptive war. What does Ariel Sharon know that we do not?" And if Saddam intends to use nuclear weapons to "dominate the entire Middle East," why ha...