http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/the-mega-lie-called-the-war-on-terror-a-masterpiece-of-propaganda-by-richard-w-behan/“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie … The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.” –Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is “big enough” to confirm Joseph Goebbels’ testimony. It is a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the “War on Terror.”
The Bush administration endlessly recites its mantra of deceit:
The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home and to spread democracy in the Middle East.
This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities.
This is classic propaganda. In Goebbels’ terms, it is the “state” speaking its lie, but the political, economic, and military consequences of the Bush administration lie are coming into view, and they are all catastrophic. If truth is the enemy of both the lie and George Bush’s “state,” then the American people need to know the truth.
The military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were not done in retaliation for 9/11. The Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and they were set in motion as early as Feb. 3, 2001. That was seven months prior to the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and the objectives of the wars had nothing to do with terrorism.
This is beyond dispute. The mainstream press has ignored the story, but the administration’s congenital belligerence is fully documented in book-length treatments and in the limitless information pool of the internet. (See my earlier work, for example.)
Invading a sovereign nation unprovoked, however, directly violates the charter of the United Nations. It is an international crime. Before the Bush administration could attack either Afghanistan or Iraq, it would need a politically and diplomatically credible reason for doing so.
The terrorist violence of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a spectacular opportunity. In the cacophony of outrage and confusion, the administration could conceal its intentions, disguise the true nature of its premeditated wars, and launch them. The opportunity was exploited in a heartbeat.
Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the United States “… would take the fight directly to the terrorists,” and “… he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them.” Thus the “War on Terror” was born.
The fraudulence of the “War on Terror,” however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:
In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist. Offers by the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden were ignored, and he remains at large to this day.
In Iraq, when the United States invaded, there were no al Qaeda terrorists at all.
Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.
The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.
A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11. If the “War on Terror” is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.
Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq’s undeveloped crude oil reserves. They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the “hydrocarbon framework law.”
The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.
Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of a number of major oil companies. The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.
President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory “benchmark” when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007.
When it took office, the Bush administration brushed aside warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their anxiety to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq was based on other factors.
Iraq
The Iraqi war was conceived in 1992, during the first Bush administration, in a 46-page document entitled Draft Defense Planning Guidance.
The document advocated the concept of preemptive war to assure the military and diplomatic dominance of the world by the United States. It asserted the need for “… access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil.” It warned of “… proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” And it spoke of “… threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism.” It was the template for today’s war in Iraq.
The Draft Defense Planning Guidance was signed by the secretary of defense, Richard Cheney. It was prepared by three top staffers: Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad-all of whom would fill high-level positions in the administration of George W. Bush, nine years in the future.
In proposing global dominance and preemptive war, it was a radical departure from the traditional U.S. policy of multilateral realism, and it was an early statement of the emerging ideology of “neoconservatism.”
The document was too extreme. President George H.W. Bush publicly denounced it and immediately retracted it. Many in his administration referred to its authors as “the crazies.”
But the ideology survived. Five years later William Kristol and Robert Kagan created a neoconservative organization to advocate preemptive war and U.S. global dominion to achieve, in their words, a “benevolent global hegemony.” It was called the Project for the New American Century, quickly abbreviated as PNAC. Among the founding members were Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Jeb Bush.
In a letter to President Clinton on Jan. 26, 1998, the Project for the New American Century once more urged the military overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.
President Clinton ignored the letter, apparently viewing this iteration of the proposal as no less crazy than the original.
As the presidential campaign of 2000 drew to a close, the PNAC produced yet another proposal for U.S. world dominion, preemptive war and the invasion of Iraq. It was a document called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources For a New Century” (PDF).
Weeks later, in January of 2001, 29 members of the Project for the New American Century joined the administration of George W. Bush. Their ideology of world dominion and preemptive war would dominate the Bush administration’s foreign and defense policies.
Within 10 days of his inauguration, President Bush convened his National Security Council. The PNAC people triumphed when the invasion of Iraq was placed at the top of the agenda for Mideast foreign policy. Reconciling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long the top priority, was dropped from consideration.
The neoconservative dream of invading Iraq was a tragic anachronism, an ideological fantasy of retrograde imperialism. A related and far more pragmatic reason for the invasion, however, would surface soon.
No administration in memory had been more closely aligned with the oil industry. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were intimately tied to it, and so was National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. So were eight cabinet secretaries and 32 other high-level appointees.
By early February, Vice President Cheney’s “Energy Task Force” was at work. Federal agency people were joined by executives and lobbyists from the Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Shell and BP America corporations.
Soon the task force was poring over
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