Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, toppling the despot Saddam Hussein and fomenting a kind of hell that Iraq is still grappling with today.
Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media — with one notable exception — bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The war — along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials — also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of Islamic State and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis.
That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." (The memorable metaphor was dreamed up by the late Michael Gerson, a Bush speechwriter at the time.)
