I don’t believe we have ever posted a piece that is politically motivated. Furthermore, I am hesitant to do so, but I can no longer listen to colleagues, friends and acquaintances debate that the arguments to go to war in Iraq were legitimate.

Fact: Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In October 2004, the Iraq Study Group (ISG), the U.S. government’s postwar effort to find Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of WMD, concluded in a one-thousand-page report that there was no such arsenal. The group also found no evidence of an effort to buy uranium from other countries.

Six months later the Robb-Silberman commission (The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) established by Executive Order 13328 and signed by President George W. Bush on February 6, 2004 noted, “In front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities and was producing chemical weapons. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over.”

Also in 2005, the CIA issued an internal report that amounted to a major correction of its previous conclusions on chemical weapons. Titled “Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990’s,” the report concluded that “Iraq probably did not pursue chemical warfare efforts after 1991.”

Fact: No solid evidence of a nexus between Iraq and Islamic extremist terrorists, such as al Qaeda, existed.

In June 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission released its report, which concluded, unanimously, that while there had been contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it had seen no evidence of “a collaborative operational relationship.” Instead, by the end of 2004, the U.S. intelligence community would conclude that the invasion had turned Iraq into a new breeding ground for a fresh generation of tougher, more professional Islamic extremist terrorists.

These are the facts and they are indisputable.