NST Leader: Iraq war, 20 years after

THE Iraq war has its origin in a lie: weapons of mass destruction that were not there. This we know. But what many don't know is the hubris that led to the lie. And what exactly is the hubris?

That the United States and Britain know Baghdad better than they know London and Washington. What's worse, the then US president George W. Bush and the then British prime minister Tony Blair thought they knew what the Iraqis wanted: Western-style democracy by invasion.

Twenty years on, a country lies in utter ruin. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished in the invasion and what followed afterwards.