This month marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. While, tragically, there are almost too many victims to tally from this criminal act of America’s making, the notion of truth must certainly count as primary among them.
We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. By 2.40pm on 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden).
Days later, on 14 September, President Bush had his first post-9/11 phone call with Tony Blair, the UK prime minister. According to Bruce Riedel, who was present at the call as a member of Bush’s national security council, Bush told Blair about his plans to “hit” Iraq soon. “Blair was audibly taken aback,” Riedel remembers. “He pressed Bush for evidence of Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 attack and to al-Qaida. Of course, there was none, which British intelligence knew.”
American intelligence also knew there was no connection, but that didn’t stop the administration from concocting its own truth out of blood and thin air, so determined were they to invade Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US had captured a man, Ibn al Shaikh al-Libi, whom they suspected of high-level al-Qaida ties. The US flew their captive in a sealed coffin to Egypt, where the Egyptians tortured him into stating that Iraq supported al-Qaida and was assisting with chemical and biological weapons.
This was a confession extracted under torture, and therefore – as the Senate select committee on intelligence’s 2014 “Torture Report” points out – fundamentally unreliable. Al-Libi later recanted his statement, the report explained, saying that he had simply told his torturers “what he assessed they wanted to hear”, Regardless, the information, which US intelligence believed was false on its face, made its way into Colin Powell’s speech before the UN security council in February 2003.
In other words, it was all lies, lies and more lies. In the two years following 9/11, Bush and his top officials publicly uttered at least 935 lies about the threat that Saddam posed to the United States, according to the Center for Public Integrity. In the run-up to war, Bush & associates flooded the airwaves with the talking point “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” so often that it began to sound like a jingle from a cheap law firm commercial. Needless to say, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.
Bush succeeded at the time because the public, primed to be afraid, was susceptible to his lies and the American media was pliable. The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies with, well, let’s call it questionable professionalism.
By 2004, the paper was issuing its own mea culpa, admitting it had misled readers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and more, because accounts by anti-Saddam exiles “were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq”.
In all its agonized self-reflection, the Times’ editorial somehow managed to blame foreign exiles above the US government or even the Times. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the editorial said. “So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.”
This, you might say, is old news. Why should it matter today? For one thing, the US-led invasion not only destroyed Iraq, but it displaced some 9 million people, killed at least 300,000 civilians by direct violence, and devastated Iraq’s already precarious environment. Over 4,400 Americans were also killed and close to 32,000 have been wounded in action in Iraq alone.
The invasion also destabilized the region and is certainly a leading cause for today’s global migration crisis. Brown University’s Costs of War project notes that the number of people displaced by all of the US’s post-9/11 wars, at least 38 million people, “exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II”.
The Iraq war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stood on the White House lawn in 2017 and told NBC’s Chuck Todd about “alternative facts”, far prior to Donald Trump exploiting the term “fake news”, and much before a current lawsuit revealed the nefarious coordination of a rightwing media empire and a lying government, we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.
Of course, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. (Which was probably when politicians were also invented.) And Bush is hardly the first US president to march the country into war based on a lie. Goaded on by the media baron William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley led the US into the Spanish-American war on a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie.
But the difference, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, was how the apparatus of lying became institutionalized in our government and abetted by our media: if you don’t like the information that your own intelligence agencies are providing, simply create your own agency, the office of special plans. By the time Bush left office, US troops may have begun to leave Iraq’s major cities, but the larger “war on terror” had truly become a way of life.
The world is still reeling from the consequences of these lies and the institutions built on them. In the US, they continue to corrode our politics. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are overrepresented in far-right movements in this country. Public trust in government is near an all-time low, having fallen precipitously during the Bush years. And social media companies have taken up the mantle of amplifying the lies our politicians tell.
Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the misbegotten war continues to degrade our national political life. This may be a hard reality to confront, but it’s also the truth.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
