The Carnagie Endowment for International Peace has a report titled WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications that provides an honest and very interesting review of the truth behind the "facts" used to justify the second Iraq war.
MS. MATHEWS: (In progress) -- sharing with you our reasons for this study, which has been the work of many months for a great -- and for a fairly large number of us, it looks back in close detail at what happened regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for two reasons.
First of all, it looks back to allow Americans to reach judgments about how our key players and institutions performed on the most important call that any government, any country, any people can make: whether to go to war. These key players include importantly, of course -- most importantly, the president and his advisors, but also the Congress, the intelligence agencies, the independent think tanks, like ourselves, and not least, the public itself. Did it understand the key questions, and did it demand and get straight answers?
Going to war is always momentous, but there is an added importance to that right now, because with no country or combination of countries on the planet able to oppose us, there is nothing, therefore, to hold us back. There is an historically unusual risk that we would be tempted to use our power unwisely. It has never been more important that as a nation we know when to go to war and when to strive to achieve our ends by other means.
We also looked back so that we can look ahead. We have sifted through masses of information and put broad arguments and assertions under the microscope of close analysis for the purpose of asking what worked and what didn't work, what was right, what was wrong, and what recommendations can we offer to make the future better.
The study has two very different parts to it. The first is the first comprehensive review of all the publicly available information regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that has been undertaken. And I'm talking here of the unclassified information, declassified information, corroborated press reporting, the results from the international inspections, administration statements, particularly in official documents and fact sheets and major speeches, and post-war result -- so both U.S. and international sources -- and an effort to put that mass of information into a single, coherent framework.
