Global Post: DENVER, Colo. — In 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration rolled out a campaign to promote an invasion ofIraq. Condoleezza Rice’s statement, the “smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud,” created a popular sound bite for the administration’s warning that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The New York Times and other papers echoed the president’s warning on their front pages. Deep inside the papers, a reader could occasionally find a short story quoting Hans Blix, the United Nations weapons authority, affirming that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Part of the administration’s case was the suspicion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together. In fact, no evidence of a connection existed, except Dick Cheney’s wishful thinking.

What President Bush succeeded in bringing to Americans was a war that killed thousands of American service men and women, disabled of tens of thousands more, and brought death, conservatively, to 100,000 Iraqis, and dislocated several million more.

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