Lying Us Into War

President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and knowingly deceived the American people in order to gain support for an unprovoked attack on Iraq.

Before I catalog the Bush administration’s “Techniques of Deceit,” let me acknowledge that no U.N. resolution requires the president to be honest with the American people. The fine print of Resolution 1441 imposes no obligation to treat Americans as citizens to be informed rather than suckers to be conned. He may mislead, distort, suppress, exaggerate and lie to his heart’s content without violating a single sentence in 1441.

So if compliance with 1441 is all that matters to you, read no further. Turn on the TV and tune in Brokaw, Rather, Jennings, Blitzer or Lehrer, to name five of the journalistic imposters who control what you hear and see, who seem psychologically incapable of conceiving of Bush as a liar, and who wouldn’t have the guts to call him one even if they reached that conclusion.

But if you are an American citizen who believes in the bedrock democratic principle of “the informed consent of the governed,” read on.

Why lie?

The president and many of his top advisers have wanted to invade and overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein for a long time. But they knew they couldn’t sell such a war against Iraq to a majority of Americans and a majority in both houses of Congress if they acknowledged just how pitifully weak and unthreatening Iraq really is. If, however, the administration could portray Iraq as an imminent, mortal threat to the United States -- and even a shadowy accomplice in the terrorist attacks of 9-11 -- then a majority of the population might come to see an invasion of Iraq not as unprovoked U.S. aggression but as a wholly justified response to what Iraq did to us.

That is precisely what the administration has done. In an October poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, “66 percent believed [Saddam] was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.” Yes, two-thirds of Americans had come to believe a horrible thing about Saddam that the Bush administration knew for a fact was false, even as it encouraged its lesser spokespeople to continue to promote the connection. According to a Knight-Ridder poll conducted in January (.http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4911975.htm.), 41 percent of us believe Iraq has a nuclear weapon RIGHT NOW and another 35 percent are unsure or refused to answer the question. Only 24 percent know what Bush knows for an absolute fact: Iraq has no nukes. And even many in that 24 percent might not realize that Iraq would still be several years away from developing a nuke even if we did the unthinkable and allowed them to import the vast array of high-tech equipment needed just to get started.

How do people get such ridiculous thoughts in their head? A dishonest administration plants them there with a steady drumbeat of exaggerations, distortions and lies. In a process I call “lie and rely” (.http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00062.htm.), the administration relies on a cowed and craven news media to present their lies to the American people as fact -- or at a minimum, as still-to-be-confirmed assertions by respected officials with a reputation for truth-telling. A handful of print reporters occasionally exposing the most egregious lies can’t begin to overcome the effect of the steady drumbeat of lies reported as truth day after day on television.

If we factored out of the opinion polls all the people who have internalized White House disinformation as fact, support for the president’s position would plummet. Without the support of these misled millions, Bush wouldn’t have been able to ramrod through Congress a blank-check declaration. He wouldn’t have had that blank check to use as a bludgeon against the U.N., and the U.S. wouldn’t be on the verge of committing an act of unprovoked aggression.