America Choking on Force-Fed Baloney

So George Bush says if we pull out of Iraq we will subject the Iraqis to the fate of the Vietnamese people after the Vietnam War. The Bush administration will simply say anything in order to justify its misadventure in the Middle East, a tragic mistake which is making a lot of its friends very rich.

How can anyone believe anything they say about anything anymore? Everyone should watch Robert Greenwald’s “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War” (2003) for a refresher course in the lies which got us into this disaster. It wasn’t just the lies themselves—the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the “smoking gun that could become a mushroom cloud,” and Saddam Hussein’s (absolutely non-existent) ties to al Qaeda—but the insidious persistence with which they were delivered, in what can now only be seen as a calculated propaganda campaign. (See also Greenwald’s “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,” 2004.)

Isn't lying to Congress a felony? What of that?

“Americans still don’t have the full story of how Mr. Bush hustled them into a war in which United States soldiers are trapped without hope of victory,” said an August 23 editorial in the New York Times. That’s true, in large part because the Times as well as the rest of the mainstream media failed to do their jobs in an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, post-9/11. And they still haven’t.

Why, for example, has there been no serious investigative reporting on the origins of the document which had Saddam Hussein buying uranium from Niger, the basis for the now infamous “16 words” in Bush’s State of the Union address? The document has since been exposed as a fake. But where did it come from? Suspicion would seem to fall on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, who later engineered a vicious attack on Joe Wilson, the former diplomat who spoke out against the claims in the faked Niger paper. If the Times really wants to give America “the full story,” it could start with that.

Today, documentary filmmakers are doing the work the mainstream media fails to do. Greenwald’s “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers” (2006) gives a chilling picture of who is gaining, to the tune of billions of dollars, from the senseless and seemingly endless war in Iraq. The principle crisis in America today is a crisis of truth. Bush lies, who dies, the protesters like to chant. Not the heads of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, et al, you can bet on that.