April 7, 2026
Bush’s Little Bottle

People often talk about the lie of showing a small bottle to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But the real, clear, and stated goal was to export democracy to the Middle East in order to defeat terrorism; this later proved to be a tragic mistake.
It would have been easy for American intelligence services to place weapons of mass destruction somewhere and have them “discovered,” which is why I think they genuinely believed they existed. I recall that Tareq Aziz (the Chaldean minister) said that Saddam had made the Americans believe he possessed them.