The US spent months promoting a false case for the invasion of Iraq. This time, we’re in the dark about Washington’s goalsIn October 2002, George W Bush laid out his case for taking the US to war against Iraq in a half-hour speech televised around the world. Bush warned that Saddam Hussein’s regime could attack the US “on any given day” with chemical or biological weapons, including anthrax, mustard gas or the nerve agent sarin. He argued Iraq was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and could develop a bomb in less than a year. And if those warnings weren’t enough to terrify the US public, Bush invoked the ultimate fear of an unprovoked nuclear attack: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”The world soon learned that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was based on manipulated intelligence and outright lies; the Iraqi regime no longer had any weapons of mass destruction and was not developi...