I’m getting tired of articles like this one of Robert Scheer’s, from the LA Times. The public forum is spinning its wheels on the issue — heavens! — of the government’s having lied to us on the WMD/imminent threat issue:
Of course, the marketing of policy — spin — is an established, albeit unfortunate, part of politics. However, it is unacceptable to misinform your troops going into battle or mislead your citizens about why you are putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way.
Bush and his band of hawks seem to believe the ends justify the means. Thus, the terror of 9/11 and the boogeyman of Iraq’s supposed WMD stash became the key to pushing an ambitious plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. That was the pet project of a band of neocon missionaries who had failed to convince either the first Bush administration or the Clinton administration that such a campaign was plausible or desirable.
That’s not even in question; many of us knew we were being lied to from the time the Bush cabal set its sights on Iraq. At least Scheer attempts to take us further by making the obvious next point:
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is feeling real political heat for arguing before the allied invasion that Saddam Hussein “has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes,” a terrifying claim apparently now proved false.
Yet the White House seems to believe nobody cares that its war was based on the same distortions pushed by our president.
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the general’s top civilian bosses in the Pentagon and a key proponent of invading Iraq, certainly seems unconcerned with the implications of making arguments for war based on convenience rather than facts. [emphasis added — FmH]
Exactly; why does nobody, outside the progressive political commentators (who preach only to the converted) and the weblogging community (which only talks to itself) care? Is it the credulity or the apathy of the audience, or the increasing skill of the propagandists? Perhaps most of the public is just averse to living with the necessity of such constant rage at our leaders (which, after all, dates back to the Big Lies of Vietnam and the worldwide Communist conspiracy), whereas some of us, because of our own character pathology, thrive on ragefulness instead…
Related:
If the outcry mounts (which is an open question in my mind, since the American public seem to be rolling over on this one as much as they have on Bush’s theft of the election two years ago), I predict the dysadministration will conduct some sort of token witchhunt for “intelligence failures” to divert attention from the reality of the baldfaced lies at the policy level. As you see, for example from the item below, if there was “faulty intel”, it was recognized as such and used anyway.
Another stratagem coming: No Weapons in Iraq? We’ll Find Them in Iran… Edinburgh Sunday Herald
