American neocons were fixing to invade Iraq for a long spell, and Saddam Hussein often made things easy on them. In the dozen years after this 1991 To Tell the Truth episode, which featured electronics executive Jerry Kowalski, who is said to have foiled a Hussein plot to achieve atomic-weapon capacity, we went to war with the country twice, the second one waged under false pretenses which cost so many lives, a trillion dollars and our country’s reputation. In the lead up to Dubya’s folly, the right’s saber-rattling was enabled by Washington Democrats and poor reportage by largely liberal publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker. It was a widespread and profound failure of government, media, and of course, the rest of us.