Ten Years After: The Path to Iraq and 'Hubris'

On Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT), a new MSNBC documentary will investigate the deceptions which the Bush administration used to go to war in Iraq. It derives from the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (2006), by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.*

For an article in Mother Jones, Corn describes doubts which prominent Bush administration figureheads held at the time, revealing this scene in the film about former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

[. . .] Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, recalls the day Congress passed a resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq:

Powell walked into my office and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, "I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?" And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I—I wrote that down on my calendar—as close for—to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Wilkerson also notes that Powell had no idea about the veracity of the intelligence he cited during that UN speech: "Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied, we did participate in a hoax."

In March there will be the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax" [Mother Jones], by David Corn (February 16, 2013) [Read February 17, 2013]

* Update: David Corn, of Mother Jones, has just won a Polk Award for his reporting in 2012, specifically for the '47% video' starring Mitt Romney at a fundraiser. ("LIU Announces 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism," February 17, 2013 [Long Island University])