How Their Big Lie Came to Be

Bush and his band of hawks seem to believe the ends justify the means. Thus, the terror of 9/11 and the boogeyman of Iraq's supposed WMD stash became the key to pushing an ambitious plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. That was the pet project of a band of neocon missionaries who had failed to convince either the first Bush administration or the Clinton administration that such a campaign was plausible or desirable.

For Wolfowitz and friends, the 9/11 attacks were almost a gift, an opportunity to play God. "If you had to pick the 10 most important foreign policy things for the United States over the last 100 years, [Sept. 11] would surely rank in the top 10 if not No. 1," he told Vanity Fair.

Knocking Al Qaeda's Taliban friends out of Kabul became only a warm-up for dethroning Hussein as part of the broader neocon agenda. In marketing this war, however, there was a little problem: Hussein, as loathsome as he was, didn't have anything to do with 9/11. Or, as Wolfowitz put it tactfully in his interview: "That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy."

But they didn't let that stop them. They kept hyping the Al Qaeda connection and turning up the volume on the WMD alarm. After all, we knew Hussein had some scary biological and chemical weapons in the '80s because he was our ally in the war against Iran, and we supplied him with some of them.

And though United Nations inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon hawks found some Iraqi exiles in Washington who were more than willing to provide handy lists of the precise locations of deployed WMD. And thus was born the big lie: There's no time for U.N. inspectors to continue their work; the threat from Iraq is less than an hour away, and any delay puts the planet at risk.

It worked so well even our Marines were fooled.