The Big Lie
The Media, the Bush Administration, and Iraq

By: Devin Murphy

They lied - almost all of them: the President, his cabinet members, the newspapers, the pundits, and the 24-hour news shows. They told small lies and they told whoppers in order to sell a war on Iraq.

Most of the members of the media aren't reporters - they're mannikins. The only reason they're on TV is because no one's figured out how to put a good suit on Jar Jar Binks or teach bobble-head dolls how to read a teleprompter. Mainstream correspondents who do have experience in the Near East, like Thomas Freidman of the New York Times, had a postwar recipe that was 90% fantasy, cut with 10% wishful thinking. If only, they seemed to say, the Bush administration can balance the wisdom of sages, the probity of saints, and the judgement of Solomon, we will remake Iraq as a democratic paradise and example for the rest of the region.

Unfortunately for both Iraqis and Americans, the Bush administration is better endowed with platitudes than virtues. Now it is clear that the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq are in the hands of war profiteers, carpetbaggers, and incompetents.

No one expects journalists to have a crystal ball. But couldn't a few more of them employ a knowledge of history and say: "Listen: the U.S. has rebuilt only two countries successfully - Germany and Japan. In both cases it took at least ten years and the impetus of the Cold War to help these countries become stable, prosperous allies." If someone needed a sound bite, they could have screamed: "Afghanistan!" More cynical minds could have mentioned that colonialism never works, and use Africa, the Middle East, and all of the Americas south of the Rio Grande as examples.

PR flacks will be studying how the Bush administration sold this war for decades. How did this pack of sneering bullies (Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al) - led by a confused, Ivy-League frat boy - pass the beat-down of a weak, oil-rich Arab state as a war first of national survival, and then of liberation?

1. Pick a good enemy. Saddam was a torturer, murderer, plunderer, and A-1 bastard. The people of Iraq are better off without him. But what about the rest of the world's dictators? Ah yes: we call them allies.
   
   
2. Cheat. If you can't find proof of weapons of mass destruction, invent some. Thanks to a mixture of satellite imagery (is that a chemical weapons plant, an oil refinery, or Dick Cheney's pacemaker?) and "intelligence" fabricated by the Iraqi National Congress, we had all the proof needed to go to war.
   
   
3. Lie. My favorite? The promise that the Iraqi people would soon have free education and health care, two things the Bush administration is unable to provide inside the United States - where it contends with neither religious strife nor Arabic. Now these plans appear to be well beyond the reach of the American occupiers, who are currently unable to provide the citizens of Iraq with reliable water, electricity, food, or the rule of law.
   

Perhaps American troops would be more welcome in Iraq if Dubya told the Iraqis that the destruction of their government, economy, and civil society was really just the Mother of All Tax Cuts.