WMD and Propaganda

In case anyone forgot, the fearsome "weapons of mass destruction" remain hidden in Iraq.

These were the causus belli, and whoever stashed them should teach his clandestine feats to American intelligence services and military forces. This assumes, of course, Hussein really had "weapons of mass destruction."

After all, war propaganda is often one teeny kernel of truth swirling in a tornado of lies, or a blowing typhoon of lies containing no truth at all.

Either way, propaganda often makes the war.

The Big Lie

The occasion for this observation is some recent reading about the history of British propaganda and the role it played in sucking the United States into two world wars.

Not that would-be world conquerors here wanted to avoid war. They invited it, Americans opposed it, so propaganda and provocation were indispensable. Without them, Americans would never have joined either effort.

These facts are well detailed in The Costs of War, from Transaction Press, a collection of essays about this nation's costly wars, and how and why they enhanced the power of Washington's Leviathan.

During World War I, the British manufactured tales proven false before the end of the war. The Kaiser's troops, they said, bayoneted Belgian babies and nailed them to doors. This was an outrage, and when the Germans sunk a British merchant ship, the Lusitania, which carried American passengers, then we had to enter the war. Problem was, the Germans didn't bayonet any babies, and the Lusitania, an auxiliary man-of-war, carried munitions.

You don't read much about that, or about the role of British propaganda in pulling the United States into World War II. Hollywood manufactured films about the glories of the British Empire, while a British agent, set up in New York, planted pro-British articles in American newspapers.

Proving that what we don't know can kill us, The Costs of War notes that FDR promised the British full support against Germany, a violation of our neutrality policy, long before Pearl Harbor. An American admiral suggested an American sub's sinking an American ship to provoke war with Germany. Then, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and not, some speculate, without Winston Churchill's and FDR's foreknowledge. At a minimum, FDR provoked the Japanese into attacking, just as Lincoln provoked the South's firing on Fort Sumter.

Historian Roger McGrath, writing in Chronicles magazine, recently recounted North Vietnam's "attack" on the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin, which inspired the famous resolution that began the Vietnam war. North Vietnam never attacked the ship, he writes, but when we finally abandoned South Vietnam to communism, more than 50,000 American boys were dead or missing.

Now, About Those WMD

Which returns us to Iraq. After the mass murder of Sept. 11, Bush and his propagandists had to blame someone.

They couldn't catch bin Laden, mastermind of the raid, and as with two world wars and Vietnam, we couldn't simply invade Iraq, as War Minister Rumsfeld quickly suggested. We had to have reasons.

Iraq, we learned, possessed "weapons of mass destruction," and Hussein was "connected" to Al Queda. He threatened the United States. As others have observed, the horrors of Sept. 11 were accomplished using lax immigration policy and dime-store box-cutters. But that truth was lost in the monsoon of lies about nukes and giant germ bombs and "the war on the terror."

The propagandists got their war.

August 27, 2003

Syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood [send him mail] is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va.

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