Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Five years of Iraq lies

Five years of Iraq lies
How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war
peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished. 
 
 
March 19, 2008 | Each year of George W. Bush's war in Iraq has been
represented by a thematic falsehood. That Iraq is now calm or more stable
is only the latest in a series of such whoppers, which the mainstream
press eagerly repeats. The fifth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq
will be the last he presides over. Sen. John McCain, in turn, has now
taken to dangling the bait of total victory before the American public,
and some opinion polls suggest that Americans are swallowing it, hook,
line and sinker. 
The most famous falsehoods connected to the war were those deployed by the
president and his close advisors to justify the invasion. But each of the
subsequent years since U.S. troops barreled toward Baghdad in March 2003
has been marked by propaganda campaigns just as mendacious. Here are five
big lies from the Bush administration that have shaped perceptions of the
Iraq war. 
Year 1's big lie was that the rising violence in Iraq was nothing out of
the ordinary. The social turmoil kicked off by the invasion was repeatedly
denied by Bush officials. When Iraqis massively looted government
ministries and even private shops, then Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld joked that U.S. media had videotape of one man carrying off a
vase and that they kept looping it over and over again. The first year of
the war saw the rise of a Sunni Arab guerrilla movement that repeatedly
struck at U.S. troops and at members and leaders of the Shiite-dominated
Interim Governing Council appointed by the American government. 
After dozens of U.S. and British military deaths, Rumsfeld actually came
out before the cameras and denied, in July of 2003, that there was a
building guerrilla war. When CNN's Jamie McIntyre quoted to him the
Department of Defense definition of a guerrilla war -- "military and
paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by an
irregular predominantly indigenous forces" -- and said it appeared to fit
Iraq, Rumsfeld replied, "It really doesn't." Bush was so little concerned
by the challenge of an insurgency that he cavalierly taunted the Sunni
Arab guerrillas, "Bring 'em on!" regardless of whether it might recklessly
endanger U.S. soldiers. The guerrillas brought it on. 
In Year 2 the falsehood was that Iraq was becoming a shining model of
democracy under America's caring ministrations. In actuality, Bush had
planned to impose on Iraq what he called "caucus-based" elections, in
which the electorate would be restricted to the provincial and some
municipal council members backed by Bush-related institutions. That plan
was thwarted by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who demanded one-person,
one-vote open elections, and brought tens of thousands of protesters out
onto the streets of Baghdad and Basra. 
The elections were deeply flawed, both with regard to execution and
outcome. The U.S. campaign against Fallujah in November 2004, marked by
more petulant rhetoric from Bush, had angered Sunni Arabs -- who feared
U.S. strategy favored Shiite ascendancy -- and led to their boycotting the
elections. The electoral system chosen by the United Nations and the U.S.
would guarantee that if they boycotted, they would be without
representation in parliament. Candidates could not campaign, and voters
did not know for which individuals they were voting. 
Much of the American public, egged on by White House propaganda, was
sanguine when elections were held at the end of January 2005, mistaking
process for substance. Why the disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arabs, who
were becoming more and more violent, was a good thing, or why the victory
of Shiite fundamentalists tied to Iran was a triumph for the U.S., remains
difficult to discern. Nobody in the Middle East thought such flawed
elections, held under foreign military occupation, were any sort of model
for the region. 
In Year 3, the Bush administration blamed almost everything that was going
wrong on one shadowy figure: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bush set the tone for
Year 3 with a speech at Fort Bragg on July 28, 2005, in which he said,
"The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of
September 11 ... if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi .. and
if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden." The
previous week, Bush had said that the U.S. was in Iraq "because we were
attacked." Zarqawi was the perfect plot device for an administration who
wanted to perpetuate the falsehood that the Iraq war was directly
connected with Sept. 11 and al-Qaida. 
In spring of 2006, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch came out and attributed 90 percent
of suicide bombings in Iraq to Zarqawi and his organization, which he had
rebranded as "al-Qaida in Iraq," but which had begun in Afghanistan as an
alternative to Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization. Meanwhile,
security analysts discerned 50 distinct Sunni Arab guerrilla cells in
Iraq. Some were Baathists and some were Arab nationalists; some were
Salafi Sunni fundamentalists while others were tribally based. To
attribute so many attacks all over central, western and northern Iraq to a
single entity suggested an enormous, centrally directed organization in
Iraq called "al-Qaida." But there was never any evidence for such a
conclusion, and when Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in May of
2006, the insurgent violence continued without any change in pattern. 
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peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished. 
Ti brucia il culo eh? :-)