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Comment by wapz | Hacker News Reader

> And then again, your media all saw proofs of WMD in Iraq

I'm an American and maybe completely out of the loop but I never saw any news report that WMD was discovered in Iraq. I'm guessing it may have been circulated online but the news I watched never reported it from my memory.

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Maybe it was downplayed in America but it was a massive part of the UK participating in the war and eventually went on to be a big scandal after David Kelly's death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry

The nytimes famously spread the idea of WMDs in Iraq.

I just googled WMDs Iraq and NYT and was surprised to see an article in 2014 about 'confirming' WMDs in Iraq [1]. I never read this story before and don't know how widespread it was (I'm not a huge news junky but generally watch news several times/week and read online occasionally).

There was a study published in 2005 showing that a huge majority of americans (and australians/germans) did not believe WMDs were found in Iraq[2]. I do wonder how the numbers changed after the 2014 article by the NYT.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

Do notice that the article doesn't claim they found any evidence of active development or use WMDs, which is what the USA claimed as a justification for the invasion. All they found were abandoned chemical weapons from the 80s. Everyone already knew that Iraq used chemical weapons back then, so the only new discovery was that the remaining weapons had just been abandoned instead of properly destroyed.

What? It was the Bush administration who acted on intelligence that they later admitted was "the best they had" but inaccurate. Condoleezza Rice spoke many times about this in the aftermath.

Laying WMDs in Iraq at the feet of the media, as if they could influence our military's action, is ridiculous.

The media played a pivotal role in garnering enough public opinion to support the move. The administration needed the appearance of public support for the invasion, especially since international support was lacking. Of course the military can do whatever they want, as they have throughout history. But history also shows that invasions are usually preceded by public relations campaigns to convince the public it's a good idea.

Oh my God. Now we are back-in-time blaming the media for US foreign relations? You've got to be trolling me.

What did "the media" have to gain from the US going to war in Iraq? Any media campaign to convince the public would have been led by the government. All the actionable intel came from government, not the media. "The media" isn't some mass entity working together. They're one step above the general public in the knowledge chain, beneath government. Government can influence the media as much as it can influence the public.

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