"Consider the Iraq War. It was executed primarily on U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al Qaeda. To be sure, there was more to it than that--politics, oil, and perhaps revenge--but it was the al Qaeda and weapons claims that sealed the deal. Eight years, $800 billion, and nearly 4,500 American deaths later--along with at least 100,000 Iraqi fatalities--it was tempting to consider what might have happened had the purveyors of those claims admitted that they did not in fact "know" them to be true."