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Op-Ed: Autistic White House Should Turn Off the Propaganda Tap |
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(Source: defense-aerospace.com; published Oct. 10, 2003)
By Giovanni de Briganti
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PARIS --- Even as the first cracks are appearing in the Bush Administration’s public façade, with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz making amends to the Army and the White House taking over direct management of the shambles in Iraq, top US officials still appear unable to grasp that mindless repetition of their policy mantra will convince neither recalcitrant allies nor US public opinion that they were right to invade Iraq.
Judging from recent public statements, Administration officials believe that they can win both public relations battles by repeating a litany of half-truths and outright falsehoods. They remain undeterred by the “absence of evidence” in support of the invasion of Iraq, by the intelligence debacle around Iraq’s alleged attempt to buy uranium from Niger, by the absence of any significant international support and by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, the Bush Administration seems to have evolved from the classic “Inside the Beltway” mind-set to autism.
It is a particularly irritating fact that any and all White House policies are justified by the “war on terrorism,” whether or not this is germane to the subject at hand. Supporting Pakistan, kidnapping Afghans and holding them in legal limbo and tolerating Russia’s actions in Chechnya are all justified by the “war on terrorism,” and are thus, by implication, unimpeachable. Critics are unpatriotic if American, and enemies if foreign, while Bush and his cronies hold a monopoly on truth and goodness.
In an Oct. 9 speech to National Guard members in New Hampshire, Bush claimed Iraq was the “central front” in the US-led war on terror. Sounds nice, but what does Iraq have to do with the war on terror? Bush said Iraq “will no longer be a breeding ground for terror, tyranny and aggression.” OK as far as terror and tyranny are concerned, but what aggression did Iraq breed since 1991?
In parallel, Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who is prone to making bold statements that are not overly concerned with facts, is moving into overdrive. In an Oct. 8 speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Rice justified the invasion of Iraq because “the possibility remained that [Saddam Hussein] might use his weapons of mass destruction, or that terrorists might acquire such weapons from his regime, to mount a future attack far beyond the scale of 9/11.”
Although she did acknowledge that “we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks,” she conveniently overlooked the fact that there is no evidence that Iraq supported any terrorist group, or that it possessed any WMDs since the early 1990s.
“Let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity,” she added, which begs the question of whether she has read the Iraq Survey Group’s interim report.
Rice also implied that the invasion of Iraq was a preliminary step towards Bush’s ultimate goal: peace in the Middle East. “A free, successful Iraq can help create new momentum toward a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and set in motion progress toward the realization of the vision President Bush outlined on June 24th, 2002,” she said.
But Iraq is neither free nor successful, and Bush’s Middle East Road Map is in tatters. And, in Iraq as in Israel and in the Occupied Territories, civil and military deaths continue to mount up without any visible sign of improvement.
Disinformation and propaganda have a legitimate place in the arsenal of war, as a way to deceive and mislead the enemy. But, as Bush famously noted back in May, the war in Iraq is over. It is time for disinformation and propaganda to stop, the 2004 presidential election notwithstanding.
It would help if the Bush Administration finally realized that neither the American public, nor America’s allies, are quite as stupid as it thinks. (ends)
The text of Rice’s Oct. 8 speech is available on the State Department website. Click here to view in HTML format.
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