Lies and the war that has not ended

 Lies and the war that has not ended

Dr James Zogby

During the past week, as President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq, there was considerable media commentary focusing on the lies that had been utilised to build public support for the war. The two that received almost exclusive attention were the argument that Saddam had an active WMD programme and the assertion, made most vigorously by Vice President Richard Cheney, that there were "proven links" connecting the Iraqi leadership to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.


Both were, of course, deliberate fabrications but both did play important roles in shaping public opinion and justifying the invasion of Iraq. But the propaganda effort to win support for the war involved much more.


As I note in my forthcoming book Arab Voices, proponents for the war, preying on the public's lack of basic information about Iraq and its people, made exaggerated claims expressing confidence that the effort would be relatively painless. A former Pentagon official termed it a "cakewalk". Cheney said: "It'll go...quickly....Weeks rather than months." Paul Wolfowitz estimated the cost of the entire enterprise not to exceed one or two billion dollars, with Iraq's oil revenues quickly kicking into "finance its own reconstruction." President Bush and others added that "we would be greeted as liberators" ushering in a new democracy that would be "a beacon for a new Middle East."


Throughout the media universe, commentators echoed these boasts, regularly churning out outrageous claims on par with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's pre-Gulf War outrageous warning that that conflict would be the "mother of all battles."


Before the invasion began, for example, Fox News Bill O'Reilly, wagered "the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week." A similarly euphoric (and ultimately equally misleading) statement by Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, soon followed: "There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni....There's almost no evidence of that at all." Finally, journalist Fred Barnes, another Fox News host, chimed in, saying: "The war was the hard part....And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war."