LEST WE FORGET...

FLASHBACK: (CNN) -- The 10th anniversary this month of the invasion of Iraq will remind most people of a divisive and dubious war that toppled Saddam Hussein but claimed the lives of nearly 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. What it conjures up for me is the media's greatest failure in modern times. Major news organizations aided and abetted the Bush administration's march to war on what turned out to be faulty premises. All too often, skepticism was checked at the door, and the shaky claims of top officials and unnamed sources were trumpeted as fact. By the time U.S. soldiers discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the media establishment was left with apologies and explanations. The Bush-Cheney administration helped whip up an atmosphere in the wake of 9/11 in which media criticism of national security efforts seemed almost unpatriotic. As the war, once sold as a cakewalk, went sour in 2004, the New York Times said in an editor's note that its editors were "perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," some of them erroneous stories by Judith Miller. The paper said its reporting on what turned out to be nonexistent WMDs was "not as rigorous as it should have been" and that the Times overplayed stories with "dire claims about Iraq." MORE: CNN.COM