How Is the World Ruled and Led to War?
by
Robert Higgs
by Robert Higgs
 In
the late summer of 2002, as the Bush administration continued to
peddle plausible reasons for the war it had already decided to launch
against Iraq, administration spokespersons placed heavy emphasis
on the threat posed by Saddam's alleged nuclear-weapons program.
The government's efforts received a big boost on Sunday, September
8, when The New York Times published a story by Judith Miller
and Michael Gordon that quoted administration sources to the effect
that "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has
embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."
The proof consisted of Iraq's attempted purchase of "specially designed
aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as
components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."
Naturally
the imagery of a mushroom cloud found a place in the article. Americans
all understand and many react viscerally to the image of a mushroom
cloud. Hardly anything serves more effectively to marshal public
fear and thus to cause people to clamor for the protection their
government purports to provide.
The
rest of the story is described as follows in James Bamford's excellent
book A
Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence
Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 324–25.
As if the
entire event had been scripted, administration officials had all
agreed days earlier to appear on the Sunday talk shows that same
morning. Once the cameras clicked on, they made generous use of
the allegations contained in the article, now free from worries
about releasing classified information. It was a perfect scheme
– leak the secrets the night before so you can talk about
them the next morning.
In
separate appearances on Meet the Press, CNN's Late Edition,
Fox News, and CBS's Face the Nation, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza
Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld each played essentially
the same role in this made-for-TV farce.
Bamford
concludes:
The series
of events produced exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the
White House Iraq Group [WHIG] had been set up to stage-manage.
First OSP [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] supplies false
or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it
to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery;
finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as
proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously
supplied.
 It
now seems clear that the administration's allegations of Iraq's
growing nuclear threat helped substantially in bringing many in
Congress and among the general public to support the "preventive"
U.S. attack on Iraq.
As
I read Bamford's account of these events, I could not help recalling
Karl Kraus's immortal quip: "How is the world ruled and led to war?
Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those lies when they see
them in print."
 July
6, 2005
Robert
Higgs [send him mail] is
senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. His most recent book is Against
Leviathan.
Copyright
© 2005 LewRockwell.com
Robert
Higgs Archives
|
