Two weeks ago in this space, I employed the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to examine the unhappy precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in failing to level with the American people about the level of conflict between the United States and the Axis Powers that preceded the attack.
Using this analogy, and speaking of the manner in which President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately deceived the nation about the imaginary second Gulf of Tonkin incident and thereby entangled the nation in the unwinnable Vietnam War, I noted Sen. J. William Fulbright later remarked that "FDR's deviousness in a good cause made it much easier for [LBJ] to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause."
The consequences of President Johnson's campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself. And while there is no reason to minimize either the level of lying or its consequences, one cannot be impressed by the refusal of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to learn from his mistake.
As we salute the final American soldiers leaving Iraq, we also remember the enormous costs paid not only by our soldiers and our nation but also denizens of the region, millions of whom were turned into refugees and injured, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, and countless who were tortured or otherwise abused. But it behooves us to recall the underhanded manner in which President Bush and Vice President Cheney manipulated a quiescent press corps into making it appear as if an American invasion of a nation that had no intention of harming us (and next-to-no capacity to do so, regardless of intentions, as it turned out) was warranted.
At the same time, if we care about our nation's ability to act as a democracy, we need to ask ourselves and our mainstream media hard questions about how it happened. To do so, I return to some of the research I undertook for When Presidents Lie (where specific citations for all of the quotes below can be found).
The almost ostentatious lack of concern for veracity was evident in almost every area of governance but was most prominent in the administration's foreign policy pronouncements. Recall the famous (albeit anonymous) Bush press aide who, in response to a string of revelations of falsehoods relating to the president's reasons for the invasion, replied, "The President of the United States is not a fact-checker."
Yet the case President Bush made to convince the nation to embark on its first-ever "preventative" war was riddled with deception from start to finish. The examples of purposeful fraud in the Bush White House's portrayal of the level of alleged threat to Americans' safety and security posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein are so extensive that only a few examples can be offered here.
For instance, in September 2002, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush claimed:
I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] -- that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.In fact, the estimate to which President Bush was referring was more than a decade old and was made before Iraq's military capabilities were decimated in the Gulf War.
The president's then-press secretary, Ari Fleischer, tried to claim in The Washington Post that "it was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months." But that report, which was unavailable at the time President Bush originally made his claim, did not support his statement either.
In a speech to the nation, President Bush also added, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," an alliance that "could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." But this claim, too, was wholly unsupported and contradicted by CIA intelligence. The testimony, declassified after President Bush's speech, rated the possibility as "low" that Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological weapons attack against the United States but might take the "extreme step" of assisting terrorists if provoked by a U.S. attack.
In the same speech President Bush warned the nation that Iraq possessed a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States." But a CIA report suggested that the fleet was more of an "experiment" and "attempt" and labeled it a "serious threat to Iraq's neighbors and to international military forces in the region." The report said nothing about the fleet having sufficient range to threaten the United States.
President Bush's repeated acts of dishonesty did not become widely known to the public until the famous controversy regarding "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, referring to the story he told about Iraq's alleged purchase of "yellow-cake" uranium from the African nation of Niger. But the focus on the mere "16 words" by the media was most notable for the successful spin that the White House managed to put on the story.
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Michael Hughes: Iraq War in Retrospect: Toppling Saddam Not Worth the Cost
Should be required reading for admission to the voting booth... but that would presuppose literacy.
If our leaders wont hold the miscreants accountable, we must get better leaders.
Vote third-party, their hands are clean.
Third party? Their hands are clean because they never work.
A leader leads. A leader who won't lead because he'll face resistance is o leader.
As for whether a Third party works, we have a 3-decade long experience showing us that Republicans and Democrats do not work for the American People, so the risk is small.
Iran has no WMDs and Iraq had no WMDs.
This time Obama claims that Iran has WMDs not Bush.
To be honest Bush case was more convincing than Obama's case against Iran.
If nothing else, this shows that both parties are under control of MIC and Warmonger Bankers.
The list of lies that are part and parcel of Republican talking points include;
The Stimulus failed to create jobs. The Congressional Budget Office reports that the Stimulus created or saved as many as 3.6 million jobs.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Without any modification at all Social Security will be able to pay out full benefits for the next 24 years. Simple adjustments could easily make it completely solvent for the next 75 years. Last year alone SS kept 14 million seniors and over a million children out of poverty.
I could go on and on but the point is that Republicans depend on and embrace lying. It is their lifeblood and, sadly, it works. Lying got us into the Iraq War and it gets Republicans elected. It's too bad so many Americans are so gullible.
Netanyahu and Neocons will be furious over having the air let out of their most recent warmongering balloon
Mossad chief: Nuclear Iran not necessarily existential threat to Israel
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/mossad-chief-nuclear-iran-not-necessarily-existential-threat-to-israel-1.404227
Do you know how sad and small you sound? Clinton was a right-wing Democrat, and real liberals had little use for his warmongering either.
Deal with the facts in the article.
Also the speech Bush made demonized Saddam so the invasion was not about WMDs but about getting rid of Saddam. Those are the details that mainstream people do not reveal. Just like they drifted in Libya.
Good article, Prof Alterman. Looking forward to further posts.
We are very accustomed to hearing high sounding denouncements from the UN concerning many countries. We've never heard those words used about the U. S. Unless and until it does, how much credibility will it and should it have in the eyes of the world?
Here's a New Year's Wish for the UN: Come up with a precise definition of what a "terrorist" is. Lots of money has been spent and lots of lives have been lost fighting so called "terrorists". But have you actually ever seen a definition of what that word means?
"They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A."
– Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
The only solution is to get rid of the current politicians and find better people who are not American puppets to work together to serve Iraq
Americans have put back Iraq in a political crisis and the politicians only care about themselves and not the country that was the policy of the interventionist CIA strategy