[THS] William Pfaff: Lies and Wars

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25301.htm

Lies and Wars

By William Pfaff

April 23, 2010 "Tribune Media" -- Paris, April 20, 2010 – It is a dismaying reflection
that the facilitator of major violence thus far in the twenty-first century have been lies
told by democratic governments. The lies are continuing to be told, about the
supposed “existential” menace posed by Iran to Israel, America and (if you believe
some European leaders) to Western Europe.

One can say there is nothing new about lies. I would argue that the influence of
mendacious official propaganda in the western democracies is probably greater today
than in the last century.

There was a certain utopian innocence in the first half of the last century. The
secular utopian promises were truly believed. People were made happy by believing
in the romantic futures they were told would follow the seizures of power by
Bolsheviks or the Italian Fascists. In Germany, Hitler offered vengeance and
vindication to his people, and a future of supremacy. Those were serious matters, but
romantic notions too, used to justify the fulfillment of criminal fantasies. At the end of
the century, Slobodan Milosovich promised Serbs fulfillment of the dream of a greater
Serbia ruling its lesser neighbors.

One might have thought there had been a lesson in the brutal and senseless murder
of millions in the world wars to deter such ambitions.
But again the wars of Yugoslav succession were inspired by lies, deliberately
perpetuated, reawakened lies about the past, fictions about the malevolent ambitions
of intimately related fellow-peoples of the former Yugoslavia, to produce the murder
of still more of them.

One might also have thought, at the end of that century, that Mikhail (and Raissa)
Gorbachev’s inspired visitation by reason and wisdom would provide a decisive lesson
about ending the lies. Gorbachev’s first liberating proposal was Glasnost – telling the
truth. One might have believed that we would in the twenty-first century still be
breathing the oxygen of Glasnost.

It was not so. Injustice and lies in the Middle East were responsible for unnecessary
new wars in the new century, in which the United States took the lead. This time the
lies were ideologically motivated and expedient lies.

First, it was that Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for the September 2001 attacks
on United States. He did not.

Next was the fiction that Hussein’s government, during the period of UN sanctions
before 2003, was able secretly to construct nuclear weapons, despite the efforts of
western intelligence to detect them or deter him, and the presence of United Nations
arms control inspectors. There were none.

Another fiction was that if Saddam’s Iraq did somehow obtain weapons of mass
destruction, he could and would use them to attack Israel or the United States,
despite the massive retaliatory power possessed by both those states, and their
evident willingness to use it to revenge any attack.

When people insist that this danger from Iraq was not the product of western
propaganda, but a reality, or at least a plausibility, it becomes necessary to ask, as
one does in the strategic studies business: How? Give me the scenario. Tell me how
this attack could come about. Without an answer, it was necessary to conclude that
Iraq was attacked for reasons having nothing to do with weapons of mass
destruction.

According to the post-invasion testimony of Saddam Hussein’s associates, prior to the
Gulf War he was interested in weapons of mass destruction – in order to deter an
attack by Iran! He feared revenge for his own invasion of Iran in 1980, and the 8-
year war that followed, in which Iraq did use poison gas, and also enjoyed favor and
support from the United States.

The Iraqi dictator, following the Gulf War, decided that obtaining mass destruction
weapons was no longer feasible, but he deliberately cultivated an air of mystery
about his intentions as a factor of deterrence of Iran.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was motivated by the neo-conservative illusion
that the Iraqi people would welcome invasion and become a force for democracy,
and friends to Israel. Instead, the death of Saddam Hussein and destruction of his
government, the wrecking of Iraqi urban society and the country’s infrastructure and
industry, which will take years to reconstruct, ignited anarchic insurrection and
sectarian conflict, delivering the country into the power and influence of a much
larger and more important enemy of both the United States and Israel, Iran. Another
lesson about lies, one might have thought.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is reported to have sent a secret letter to
President Barack Obama last January reviewing the military options available if
diplomacy and the new American attempt to intensify international sanctions on Iran
fail to produce the desired halt in Iran’s effort, if that is what it is, to build a nuclear
deterrent.

If Iran does pursue a nuclear capability, once again it is to deter attack. Precisely the
same objection exists to theories of Iranian aggression as to those lies put forward in
2002-2003 about Iraq posing a nuclear menace to the world.

Once more the threat is a polemical invention, intended to frighten American, Israeli
(and European) voters, and prompt a preemptive attack on Iran. The reason Mr.
Gates reports his uncertainties to the president is that he too recognizes that the
conflict with Iran is constructed from fictions – which, as with the lies about Iraq,
may turn into another war, whose consequences are sure to be worse for all
concerned than the fiasco and tragedy of America’s invasion of Iraq.

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