http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/091003.html
consortiumnews.com September 10, 2003 Bush's New War
Lies By Robert
Parry IN a healthy democracy, the
grave act of going to war wouldn't be justified
under false pretenses and false impressions. Plus,
government officials responsible for spreading
false rationales wouldn't be allowed to slide away
from the first batch of lies and distortions to
begin offering a new set of slippery
excuses. ![](../../../pictures/RadDiTrans2.gif)
David Irving
comments: OUR source for this
essay adds: "This
piece provides a good summary of the
changing lies of the Bush administration.
But all these lies would not work if the
people made the effort to inform
themselves about the issues. The article concludes:
"As in any democracy - even a troubled one
- it remains the ultimate responsibility
of the people to shoulder the burden of
citizenship, which includes getting the
facts and acting on them. That
responsibility also demands that the
people hold politicians accountable when
they lead the country to war with lies and
distortions." I must add that there
are some errors in the piece, the most
glaring being the author's belief that
Bush is actually making policy. Quite obviously our
befuddled president does not have the
mental capability to do this. He is simply
repeating what his largely neocon handlers
tell him."
![](../../std/dings/squaregrey.gif)
David Irving speaks on the parallels
between the actions in Iraq and those in
World War II which led to the Nuremberg
trials, in the United States this Fall.
[Details]
| But the United States is not a healthy democracy
at this time. It is dominated by a politician who
chooses to manipulate rather than lead; who would
rather trick the people into following him than
engage them in a meaningful debate; who has
demonstrated such a shallow regard for democracy
that he took office despite losing the national
popular vote and then only by blocking a full
counting of ballots in one key state.A healthy democracy wouldn't put up with this
trifling of the people's will. But in today's
United States, there appears to be little shame in
gullibility. Indeed, for some, it is a mark of
patriotism. Others just act oblivious to their
duties as citizens to be informed about even basic
facts, even when the consequences are as severe as
those of wartime. This sad state of affairs was highlighted in a
new Washington Post poll, which found that
seven in 10 Americans still believe that Iraq's
ousted leader Saddam Hussein was involved in
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks although U.S.
investigators have found no evidence of a
connection. As the Post notes, this widely held public
misperception explains why many Americans continue
to support the U.S. occupation of Iraq even as the
other principal casus belli - trigger-ready
weapons of mass destruction - has collapsed.
[For more details on the poll, see the
Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.] Bush's
Speech The search for Iraq's WMD apparently has become
such a farce that George W. Bush barely
mentioned it during his nationally televised speech
on Sunday. He
slipped into the past tense in saying the former
regime "possessed and used weapons of mass
destruction," without attaching a year or a decade
to his statement. Iraq's alleged use of chemical
weapons dates back to the 1980s and its possession
of effective WMD may have ended in the 1990s,
according to some information that U.S.
intelligence has received from former senior Iraqi
officials.
While downplaying the WMD case, however, Bush
continued to work the subliminal connection between
the Sept. 11th murders and Iraq. Indeed, after listening to Bush on Sunday
juxtapose references to the Sept. 11th murders,
their al-Qaeda perpetrators and Iraq, it shouldn't
be surprising how seven out of 10 Americans got the
wrong idea. It's pretty clear that Bush intended
them to get the wrong idea. In speech after speech, Bush has sought to
create public confusion over these connections.
Though no Iraqis were involved in the terror
attacks two years ago - and though Osama bin
Laden and most of the attackers were Saudis -
Bush and his top aides routinely have inserted
references about Iraq and the Sept. 11 terror
attacks in the same paragraphs. They often used
unsubstantiated assertions that Iraq was sharing or
planning to share WMD with Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda as the connection. That practice of blending Sept. 11 with Iraq
continued into Bush 's speech Sunday night
defending the U.S. occupation of Iraq and asking
for $87 billion more to pay for it. "Since America
put out the fires of September the 11th, and
mourned our dead, and went to war, history has
taken a different turn," Bush said. "We have
carried the fight to the enemy." Given that Iraq was the context of the speech, a
casual listener would assume that Iraq attacked the
United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the United
States was simply hitting back. An average
American, who wasn't steeped in the facts of the
Middle East, would be left with the impression that
Saddam Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda were allies. The reality is that Hussein and bin Laden were
bitter rivals. Hussein ran a secular state that
brutally suppressed the Islamic fundamentalism that
drives al-Qaeda. Indeed, many of the atrocities
committed by Hussein's government were done to
suppress Islamic fundamentalists, particularly from
Iraq's large Shia population. Bin Laden despised
Hussein as an "infidel" who was repressing bin
Laden's supporters and corrupting the Islamic world
with Western ways. Bush
History Other inconvenient facts that Bush has left out
of all his speeches about Iraq include that his
father, George H.W. Bush, was one of the U.S.
officials in the 1980s who was assisting and
encouraging Hussein in his bloody war with Iran to
contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. The younger Bush also doesn't mention that the
CIA and its allies in Pakistani intelligence - not
Iraqis - were involved in training al-Qaeda
fundamentalists in the arts of explosives and other
skills useful to terrorists. That was part of the
U.S. covert operation against Soviet forces in
Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bush also trusts that the American people will
have forgotten that other little embarrassment of
the Iran-Contra Affair, when the elder Bush and
President Reagan were involved in a secret policy
of shipping missiles to Iran's government. At the
time, Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime was
designated a terrorist state by the U.S.
government. Nor does the public hear much about how the U.S.
government taught the dictators of Saudi Arabia
techniques of suppressing political dissent to keep
that oil-rich kingdom in pro-U.S. hands. Saudi
leaders also financed Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East as
part of the Saudi strategy for buying protection
for their dictatorial powers. Out of this mix of
repression and corruption emerged an embittered
Osama bin Laden, a scion of a leading Saudi family
who turned against his former patrons. If Americans knew more about this convoluted
history, they might draw a very different
conclusion than the one George W. Bush wants them
to draw. Rather than seeing black-hatted villains
who need a taste of Bush's Western-style justice,
the American people might conclude that Bush's
father and other top U.S. officials were at least
as implicated in supporting Osama bin Laden and
other international terrorists as Saddam Hussein
was. Indeed, if the full history were known, Hussein
might appear less like a rogue leader than a U.S.
client who was useful during his violent rise to
power but then went awry. Not only did the CIA
collaborate with Hussein's Baathist Party as a
bulwark against communism in the 1960s and 1970s,
but Hussein personally sought U.S. advice at key
moments from the 1980s to as late as 1990. In ordering invasions
of two neighboring countries - Iran in 1980 and
Kuwait in 1990 - Hussein may well have believed
he had received "green lights" from the United
States. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's
"Missing U.S.-Iraq History."] U.S. intelligence also understood the
implausibility of Hussein sharing WMD with his arch
Islamic fundamentalist rivals. A year ago, a CIA
assessment was released acknowledging this reality.
The CIA told Congress that Hussein would not share
weapons of mass destruction with Islamic terrorists
unless he saw a U.S. invasion as inevitable.
[For details, see Consortiumnews.com's
"Misleading the Nation to War."] In seeking to manipulate U.S. public opinion
now, however, the Bush administration has done all
it can to "lose" this history and these nuances.
With a few exceptions, the U.S. news media has gone
along, as journalists appear more interested in
proving their "patriotism" - and keeping their
high-paying jobs - than telling the full story. The
American people have been fed a steady diet of
false impressions and misleading arguments. New Half
TruthsNow, as the bloody reality of conquering Iraq
intrudes on the pre-war fantasies of happy Iraqis
showering U.S. troops with rose petals, the
administration's misleading rhetoric has switched
from exaggerating the danger posed by Saddam
Hussein's government to exaggerating the gains
attributable to the invasion. New half-truths and lies are quickly replacing
the old ones, lest Americans begin to wonder how
they got fooled by the earlier bogus rationales. In
Bush's speech Sunday night, he highlighted two of
these new arguments for a long-term military
occupation of Iraq. One of the new reasons is that the resistance to
the U.S. occupation can be attributed to two groups
- die-hard Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists
slipping into Iraq. "Some of the attackers are
members of the old Saddam regime who fled the
battlefield and now fight in the shadows," Bush
said. "Some of the attackers are foreign terrorists
who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on
America and other free nations." But what Bush leaves out is that there is a
third force in Iraq: nationalist Iraqis who resent
foreign occupation of their country. Many of them
had no fondness for Hussein and may have welcomed
the overthrow of the brutal dictator. Some of these nationalists may have served in
Iraq's army while others appear to be young Iraqis
who have begun fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq
much as young Palestinians have battled the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank. Other Iraqi fighters
may be driven by revenge for the thousands of
Iraqis killed in the U.S. invasion. This likelihood of widespread resistance was
known by Bush and his advisers before the war.
"U.S. intelligence agencies warned Bush
administration policymakers before the war in Iraq
that there would be significant armed opposition to
a U.S.-led occupation, according to administration
and congressional sources familiar with the
reports," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 9,
2003. But this information shared the fate of other
facts that didn't support Bush's propaganda themes.
It disappeared. The American people now are
supposed to believe that the resistance is only a
mixture of Saddam "dead-enders" and "foreign
terrorists." The second new myth is that by killing
"terrorists" in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S.
homeland will be made safer. "The surest way to
avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the
enemy where he lives and plans," Bush said Sunday
night. "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and
Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again
on our own streets, in our own cities." While this argument is another not-so-subtle
appeal to the residual fears from Sept. 11, 2001,
and America's hunger for revenge, it is not a
logical formulation. Indeed, there is no reason to
believe that killing Iraqis and other Middle
Easterners in Iraq won't incite other people to
attack Americans in the United States or elsewhere.
Indeed, many savvy U.S. military analysts expect
just such a response as revenge for the deaths
inflicted by Bush's invasion of Iraq. It also is clear that Bush still is resisting
the time-tested lessons of
counterinsurgency&emdash;that blunt force is no
more likely to achieve peace than is abject
cowardice, that peace and security are achieved
through a combination of factors: a measured
application of force combined with a sensible
strategy for achieving political justice and
economic improvements. History also teaches that there are limits of
national power no matter how noble a cause might
be, that in geopolitics as in personal lives, the
road to hell is often paved with good
intentions. In Bush's televised speech, however, he
presented the ongoing war as a choice of weakness
or strength, good or evil, with no sense of the
subtleties of history or the gray areas of past
diplomacy. "We have learned that terrorist attacks
are not caused by the use of strength; they are
invited by the perception of weakness," Bush
said. P.R.
TricksBeyond the speech, the Bush administration has
issued reports that engage in such obvious P.R.
tricks that they must assume the American people
have the sophistication of pre-schoolers. For instance, to commemorate Aug. 8, the 100th
day since Bush donned his flight suit and declared
"mission accomplished," the White House released a
report entitled "Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward
Security and Freedom." The paper, which offered 10
reasons in 10 categories to support the thesis,
declared "substantial progress is being made on all
fronts." The artificial construct, requiring 10 reasons
in each of the 10 categories, led to much
stretching of facts and some repetition of
examples. For instance, Reason No. 9 under "signs
of cultural rebirth" used a quote from a member of
Baghdad's city council declaring that "if you want
to civilize society, you must care about
education." The same trite-and-true quote crops up
again three pages later as another example in
another category. But more significantly, the report repeats much
of the elliptical reasoning and selective
intelligence used before the war to exaggerate
Iraq's WMD threat and to connect Iraq with
al-Qaeda. "Saddam Hussein's regime posed a threat to the
security of the United States and the world," the
report asserts. "The old Iraqi regime defied the
international community and 17 U.N. resolutions for
12 years and gave every indication that it would
never disarm and never comply with the just demands
of the world." There is no acknowledgment in the report that
U.S. troops have failed to find any WMD. Nor is
there any reference to the fact that U.N. weapons
inspectors, such as Hans Blix, believed that
Iraq was demonstrating
greater compliance in the weeks before the
U.S. invasion or that the invasion was carried out
in defiance of a majority on the U.N. Security
Council. The White House report also continues to use
selective information to support the
administration's case, while leaving out contrary
facts or a fuller context. For instance, the report states that "a senior
al-Qaeda terrorist, now detained, who had been
responsible for al-Qaeda training camps in
Afghanistan, reports that al-Qaeda was intent on
obtaining WMD assistance from Iraq." The report
leaves out the fact that nothing resulted from this
overture. The report also repeats the story that an
al-Qaeda associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
went to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment,
but leaves out that no evidence has surfaced that
the Iraqi government was aware of his presence or
cooperated with him. Similarly, the report notes that "a safe haven
in Iraq belonging to Ansar al-Islam - a terrorist
group closely associated with Zarqawi and al-Qaeda
- was destroyed during Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Left out is that the Ansar al-Islam base was in a
northern section of Iraq that was outside the
control of the Baghdad government and under the
protection of a U.S. no-fly zone. But the report, like Bush's Sunday speech, is
just another indication that the administration
never wanted a real debate about its war policy in
Iraq. The goal has always been to tilt the evidence
- often with a dose of public abuse for anyone who
asks too many questions - so the American people
can be herded like sheep into Bush's desired
direction. Weakened
DemocracyAs the nation plunges deeper into a costly and
bloody war, there is little about this process that
resembles a healthy - or even meaningful -
democracy. Though Bush claims that his goal is to
bring democracy to Iraq, he apparently thinks very
little of the process at home. Rather than invite a
full debate, he tries to rig the process to
manufacture consent. Bush's contempt for an informed electorate on
the issue of war in the Middle East also doesn't
stand alone. In December 2000, his respect for
democracy didn't even extend to the basic principle
that in a democracy, the candidate with the most
votes wins. Not only did Bush lose the popular vote to Al
Gore by more than a half million ballots, Bush
blocked a full and fair counting of votes in
Florida for the simple reason that he was afraid of
losing. Instead, he ran to his father's powerful
friends on the U.S. Supreme Court and got them to
shut down the troublesome recount, which had been
ordered by the state supreme court. [For
details, see Consortiumnews.com's
"So Bush Did Steal the White House."] But Bush is only partly to blame for this steep
decline in American democratic traditions and for
the nation's stumble into the dangerous quicksand
of a Middle East occupation. As in any democracy - even a troubled one - it
remains the ultimate responsibility of the people
to shoulder the burden of citizenship, which
includes getting the facts and acting on them. That
responsibility also demands that the people hold
politicians accountable when they lead the country
to war with lies and distortions.![](../../std/dings/square.gif) ![](../../std/dings/related_250.gif)
The Independent: Twenty
lies about the Iraq War
|