I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

Okay, it was mostly me.

I had some help from a clueless President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative puppet

master Vice President Dick Cheney.

Senior White House fanatics spoon-fed reporters like me cherry-picked intelligence about

Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction so that America could invade Iraq and seize its

oil. None of this is true, but many Americans continue to believe it.

People died. It was a war, but President Bush didn't lie us into it. The false narrative

that he did is itself a lie and deserves to be at last retired.

There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and some of the media's pre-war WMD stories

were wrong, including some of mine.

But so is the enduring pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence

to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials

cited the intelligence community's incorrect conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities

and on occasion went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others, completely understandable

mistakes given Saddam's horrendous record and making errors of judgment are not the same

as lying. American, in European arms control experts, counterterrorism agents, and analysts

who studied Iraq and briefed White House officials and journalists were the same people

who gave me and my fellow reporters at the New York Times accurate information for years

about Osama bin Laden and El Qaeda's growing threat to America.

In fact, eight months before 9-11, the Times published a series of articles on that threat,

a series for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer Prize.

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