The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition.

Pelosi’s statement is a sweeping indictment of the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She argues that the war was justified publicly through claims—especially about weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism—that were not substantiated by solid evidence. By calling the strategy a “radical doctrine of pre-emptive war,” she frames the invasion as a sharp break from prior U.S. norms that generally required clearer imminence or broader authorization. Her final charge—that the president failed to build a “true international coalition”—underscores a legitimacy critique: even if military action were contemplated, it should have been pursued with wider allied and multilateral backing.