Before Donald Trump became President Trump, he was a candidate in a very crowded Republican primary.

And one way he stood out during his 2016 campaign was by bluntly attacking President George W. Bush

for launching the Iraq war, like in this CBS News debate.

George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should

have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. Trump criticized the war, but also

Bush's justification for the war. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There

were none, and they knew there were none. Bush did argue to Americans and to the world that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator,

was building weapons of mass destruction, and that the U.S. needed to stop him.

Here's Bush talking about Iraq in 2002.

It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.

It is seeking nuclear weapons.

That assessment was, of course, inaccurate. No such stockpiles were found after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And the Iraq war would become a quagmire. It cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion by one estimate.

It killed more than 4,000 U.S. service members and well over 100,000 Iraqis.

And it outlasted Bush's presidency, only officially concluding near the end of President Obama's first term.

Today, I can report that, as promise, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.

After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over.

And Obama would end up sending more troops into Iraq in 2014 after the rise of ISIS.

There are still U.S. forces there today.

This history is important because, as we record this episode Wednesday afternoon on the East Coast, President Trump

is threatening to bring the U.S. military into another Middle East conflict. As with Iraq,

the justification for a potential attack on Iran is the alleged threat of a nuclear

weapon.

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