NEXT year will be the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Iraq war. This means this year is the anniversary of multiple fake news stories about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). It took a whole year of untrue stories about Saddam Hussein’s secret germ bombs and nuclear weapons to promote the war.

We will get quite a lot of media attention around the war anniversary — much accepting that the Iraq invasion was a bloody failure built on lies and some trying to justify the disaster.

But we have very little media attention on the fake stories before the war — because that would mean the media looking at failures by the media, and that just won’t happen.

The media stories about Hussein’s biological weapons factories, nerve gas stockpiles and so on were much more absurd than any government dossier. The US media did try to examine its role in this fake news a bit. But the British media just moved on.

To take one small example, I looked at First With The News, the 2016 autobiography of Michael Evans, the Times defence editor in 2003.

In his autobiography, Evans says that he countered absurd WMD stories with “a cautionary note in an article on July 11 2002. I said the nuclear threat should not be exaggerated” as Hussein might have been closer to developing a nuclear bomb in 1991, but that threat was long gone.

I looked up the actual article by Evans and Roland Watson. It is headlined “Iraq building up deadly arsenal, say defectors.”

It begins: “Saddam Hussein has made important progress in developing weapons of mass destruction capable of killing millions of people, senior Iraqi defectors say. Their testimony suggests that the Iraqi president is pressing ahead with all three elements of his secret weapons project: nuclear, chemical and biological.

“The analysis is based on material gained from officials who worked on the programme and intelligence on Iraqi agents trying to buy dual-use components.”

The article does indeed say “the nuclear threat should not be exaggerated” and Hussein “is a long way from achieving his ambition to become a nuclear weapons power in the region.”

But instead, it warns “production of biological agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and ricin can be carried out under cover of legitimate pharmaceutical plants and small laboratories that remained intact after the [1990-91] Gulf war,” and “4,000 tons of chemicals that could be used in the manufacture of VX nerve gas and thousands of tons of chemical weapons munitions.”

This was all completely untrue, largely based on fake claims by Iraqi “exiles,” unsubstantiated by any real documents or evidence. As with all other papers, Evans did not warn that these “exiles” had a habit of falsehood.

Evans says in his autobiography: “I followed this up with another cautionary article on August 29. This was less than two weeks before Tony Blair published his famously controversial report on Iraq’s WMDs.”

Evans says he “pointed out” the only store of nuclear material in Iraq was the “low-grade uranium” held at Tuwaitha, under International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring, so useless for weapons.

But if we look at this actual “cautionary article,” it is headlined “Secret files on Baghdad's weapons plans.” It does say Hussein was very unlikely to have nuclear weapons. But also says “Sources said that Hussein had ‘several hundred’ scientists and engineers fully employed on developing nuclear, chemical and biological systems” and that “much of the recent focus had been on Iraq’s secret plans to ‘weaponise’ biological agents, such as anthrax and smallpox.”

While cautioning on nuclear, Evans promoted completely untrue claims on chemical and biological WMD. The article says the information “has come from Iraqi defectors because of the difficulty of acquiring ‘primary source’ Intelligence from within Iraq,” without any caution about these “exiles” and their phoney evidence.

Evans wrote yet more fake news stories in 2002 about WMD. One from August 3 is headlined “Whitehall dossier says Saddam plans biological weapons for Palestinians.”

The story claims “Hussein is suspected of planning to arm a Palestinian terrorist group with biological weapons to attack either American or Israeli targets,” suggesting this information comes from “a Whitehall dossier containing a detailed assessment of Hussein’s WMD programme, which has been circulated to the prime minister and other senior Cabinet ministers.”

But even the dodgiest dossier published by Blair never made this claim. The story looks like a manufactured “leak” was used by ministers to create a fake story in the Times saying Hussein would give WMD to a “terrorist group” — a story the government could not itself say publicly because it was rubbish.

The Times ended up printing a fake conspiracy theory claiming Hussein had WMD that he would give to terrorists. We can guess how this story got into the media, but unfortunately, the people that could give the full explanation are journalists — and they don’t like to examine the harm that journalists can do.

Partly this is self-interest. Evans is clearly looking back at his role in fake WMD stories with rose-tinted glasses, recalling his minor notes of caution while hiding his big mistakes.

But it is also part of a larger editorial process. Editors wanted to publish WMD and terrorism stories about Iraq. Journalists like Evans might have, from professional pride, put in the odd cautionary note, but couldn’t help but fit in with the demand from the boss.

With, it seems, the help of people in government, Evans wrote fake news about WMD because that’s what the system wanted. Now that they turn out to be propaganda, we all forget about them.

It is not fair to pick on Evans — dozens of top journalists churned out similar WMD fake news based on dodgy, unexamined sources. Evans just had the misfortune to write an autobiography trying to show he was better on the WMD story than he really was. The other editors and journalists who promoted this fake news have just kept quiet about it ever since.

Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @SolHughesWriter.