Iraq War: Deceiving ... the enemy?

Sam Gardiner takes a look at the methods the Bush administration has used to sell the Iraq War to the US public: The enemy is us by Sam Gardiner Salon.com 09/22/04.

One important point he makes, that well worth considering as we hear the administration and its supporters defend the disaster that is the Iraq War, is that they are relying on a formula that Gardiner characterizes as Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

Neocon Kenneth Adelman, who famously predicted that the Iraq War would be a "cakewalk" for the US, employed this tack on his appearance on the PBS Newshour on 09/21/04:

I would say that there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein was fronting terrorism. There's no doubt about that. They were funding the Palestinians who blow up innocent Israeli children, where William Harrop served so wonderfully as ambassador. It's for sure that the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 went to Iraq afterwards and were given sanctuary. It's for sure that Abu Nidal, one of the worst terrorists in the world, lived for many years in Baghdad. It's for sure that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate the ex-president of the United States, President George Herbert Walker Bush. So he was involved in terrorism. ...

But what you want to do [in Iraq] is to get everybody to help the situation. We have an enormous stake in making that succeed. The world has an enormous stake in making that succeed. And for these other countries to sit on their hands and to say, well, you know, that it's none of our business, it's just wrong. It's a fight from terrorism against civilization.

In Gardiner's article, he mentions a few items that were widely taken as fact that turn out to have been not so:

During the early part of the war, there was more deception than truth in the comments and press briefings of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among the fabricated stories was the early surrender of the commander and the entire 51st Iraqi mechanized division. We were told of an uprising in Basra -- it did not happen. We were told Iraqis had stolen U.S. uniforms to commit atrocities -- this was not true. We were told on White House and State Department Web sites that the Iraqi military had formed units of children to attack the coalition -- untrue. We were told of a whole range of agreements between the French and Iraq before the war over weapons -- false. We were told Saddam had marked a red line around Baghdad and that when we crossed it Iraq would use chemical weapons -- completely fabricated.

We were told of an elaborate scheme by Saddam's forces to ambush U.S. Marines on March 23 as they fought toward Baghdad. The president mentioned this incident many times. It turns out what really happened that day is that the Marines were repeatedly attacked by a U.S. Air Force A-10. It was a friendly-fire incident, not an Iraqi ruse. But building on the theme of Iraqi evil was more important than the truth.

Military intelligence officials' prewar assertion when no WMD were found that Iraq had moved its weapons to Syria is another example of information denial. But although the Iraq Survey Group report to be released at the end of this month will announce once and for all that Iraq did not have WMD, the WMD argument already served its purpose in garnering support for the invasion. The important message now remains: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

For a longer discussion of information manipulation in the Iraq War, see Gardiner's 10/08/03 paper Truth from These Podia (*pdf file).