September 11, 2001. 19 Islamic militants, 15 Saudis, one Lebanese, one Egyptian and two Emirati, hijacked four U.S. civilian airplanes and flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A third slammed into the outer wall of the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing 125, only continuous loops of spiral rebar, tightly spaced columns and reinforced concrete ceilings in the “overbuilt” Pentagon prevented structural collapse and hundreds more casualties. The fourth, with the U.S. Capitol as the target, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania as passengers – “Let’s roll!”…

[Featured Image: Getty Images] First responders were still searching the rubble of the twin towers when Bush and his inner circle pivoted from tracking down Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to invading Iraq. Richard Clarke was in the White House on the night of 9/11, he recalls, “Rumsfeld came over . . . and the president finally got back [from reading The Pet Goat]. We had a meeting . . . and Rumsfeld said, ‘You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, . . . There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something…

[Featured Image: David Burness / Contact Press Images] In his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush declared, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” quickly dubbed, in press shorthand, “the 16 words.”  Joe Wilson was dumbfounded, he knew it wasn’t true. He told journalist Seymour Hersh, “I gave them months to correct the record. . . but they kept on lying.” Finally, in a July 6, 2003 Op-Ed to the New York Times, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Wilson said that “if his…

[Featured photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye / Getty Images] In my introduction to U.S. Meddling in the Middle East, I said: The 2003 invasion of Iraq unhinged the Middle East, causing misery for millions, creating a power vacuum eagerly filled by Islamic fundamentalists and ratcheting up terrorism beyond our worst nightmares. It will go down as the greatest U.S. foreign policy debacle, bar none – Vietnam is not even a close second – in the history of our republic.  Debacle doesn’t begin to describe it.  Just by the numbers. First, the death toll, both Iraq and Afghanistan: 6,951 U.S. soldiers, almost…