river. this was in 1991? yes. despite every intvitation to coe back to the world community, including when we had a new president with president clinton, he constantly played hide and seek with the u.n. inspectors, in spite of that, they were able to find that he restarted the nuclear program that the israelis had bombed ten years before. it turns out he had a substantial biological weapons program, including anthrax. and then in 1998, he kicks out the inspectors, bombs iraq and the inspectors were out for five years. that s the scenario leading up to 2003. things didn t start on march 19th, 2003. it s important to understand that. what made 2003 possible was 2001. that is to say after 9/11 there are people like richard clarke at the national security council who said there were people and
my fellow citizens shortly after 9:00 on the evening of march 19th, 2003, president george w. bush announced in a televised address that american and coalition forces had begun military operations in iraq. tuesday will mark the tenth anniversary of that day. paul wolfowitz was then the deputy secretary of defense and he is seen by some as the chief architect of that war. i asked him to come on to have an honest conversation about it in retrospect. paul, thank you for coming. thank you for inviting me. i have to say, i m not the architect. if i had been the architect. many things would have been done differently. we ll talk about that. harper s magazine story. he says at the end of it, help us learn the lessons of iraq so we might extract something of
after ten years after it was launched on march 19th, 2003, we can say about the overthrown of saddam hussein. first, ten years. that is how long we have gone with the wars between iraq. $50 million to $60 million. that is how much the bush administration predicted it would cost. the price tag was put at $600 billion. $600 billion. that s only a little more than halfway through the war. that s the lion s share of an estimated $750 billion appropriated by congress for the wars in iraq, afghanistan and other fronts from the quote/unquote, war on terror. 70% of that came not from the war on budget, but supplemental appropriations from the non-partisan stemson center. the war did not officially end
diarrhea, gas, bloating? yes! one phillips colon health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues. with three strains of good bacteria. [ phillips lady ] live the regular life. phillips . it s march 19th, 2003. rescuers have been trying for more than an hour to save a man from falling nearly 180 feet
issues at the heart of it. you ve been really, really kind. well, it was jaw-dropping. yeah. you know, you almost feel guilty living through that period. but there were voices on the left, only 23 in the senate that came up with a very courageous vote. i hope it s a lesson to america for generations to come. great work, my friend. thank you. i really appreciate it, ed. thanks a lot. and thanks to you at home for staying with us for the next hour. as ed mentioned,last night we did air this new msnbc documentary on why the iraq war happened. it has sparked a lot of discussion, particularly the new reporting in the film. we ve had a lot of feedback on it. i m really glad we did it. we re now talking about hopefully reairing it some more times on msnbc. but a lot of people have been asking specifically about the timing. why do this now. well, we specifically did not time the new documentary to coincide with the anniversary of the invasion of iraq. the invasion of iraq of course in