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Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, two main pretexts used by Washington to launch its military operation and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime come back to memory.
The first pretext was Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, and it turned out later to be a flimsy argument. It is said that Saddam Hussein’s regime deliberately promoted this hypothesis in order to delude Iran that his army is capable of confronting any military action against Iraqi territory and thus to deter Tehran from any military attempt against Iraqi territory.
The second pretext is Saddam Hussein’s relationship with Al Qaeda. Here, too, one of the theories says that the regime of the former Iraqi president promoted this information through the media with the aim of containing bids by extremists within the ranks of the regime to establish alliances with Sunni parties or militias to protect the regime.
It appears that the two pretexts are incorrect, and the United States may have believed them or used them as an excuse to invade Iraq. In both cases, it can be said that the media is a double-edged sword.
