Shit, I was there too.
I'll never forget those times and how angry the Bush supporters made me and how many times I was insulted and slandered as a terrorist-enabling librul and Merka hater. I lost some friendships over the build up to the Iraq War and all the idiot jingoists who bought the WMD lies and the "with us or against us" sales pitch that accompanied the reporting from all the superdooperserious hacks like Judy Miller, Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Bill Kristol etc....There were so many I can't even remember them all, but those were some names that will always stick in my head. To this day I still wince at the idea of reading any article from The New Republic. I remember reading pg A1 propaganda in the NYTimes, picked up by the AA-S that was often directly contradicted by smaller profile stories buried on, say, pg 8-21. This was a consistent theme at that time where the articles with statements of near certainty about Iraqi WMD and non-compliance with UNSCOM would dominate the news. Meanwhile, credible reporters were also pushing back against these questionable reports with more nuanced reporting that challenged the "let's go get 'em and fuck 'em up" narrative dressed up in fake diplomacy (See: Knight Ridder, Jonathan Landay/Warren Strobel, Seymour Hersh, etc...) and were challenged on the basis of their patriotism and lack of journalistic objectivity. Every time I pushed back against the hawkish tough talk from friends and acquaintances who were certain that Iraq was behind 9/11 and had WMD, they would respond as if i was telling them the moon was made of cheese. My position was a practical, logical, patient one and not ideological. My stance was "we don't know" and I was adamant that the US let the UN do its job to complete the inspections process.
It still angers me to think back to the period after the WMD lie was fully exposed for the fraud it was and see how the political and media establishment worked hand-in-hand to exonerate themselves with the follow-up lie about WMD that went something like this: "we all got it wrong because we were misled."
WRONG. You all got it wrong because you wanted war and you refused to listen to the intelligence analysts, weapons inspectors, investigative journalists, and dissenting voices who warned you that the evidence was sketchy and unreliable at best.