Kenneth Cano

Kenneth Cano is a graudate student at Columbia working on his dissertaion as to how the U.S. went to war with Iraq during the second Bush administration.

It has been 10 long years since "Shock and Awe" – the opening bombardment of Baghdad – lit up the skies above the Tigris. A decade later, we know far more about the case the Bush administration made to the world to justify its war of choice to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Books like Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, and British commission and US Senate reports have catalogued the extent to which intelligence was misused to mislead the public.

Yet, even as the intervening period has brought profound change for the United States and its role in the world, have we learned the lessons of that disastrous period? And what were those lessons?

Murray Waas at the National Journal is proving himself the best muckraker in Washington: Take his lastest expose, documenting the administration's top-level machinations to cover up what Bush knew, and when Bush knew it, about Iraq's (lack of) WMD programs:

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes."