Americans Were Duped Before...By Don
WilliamsKnoxville News-Sentinel2-23-3
"It wouldn't be the first time your own government,
including your president, has lied to justify war. It happens in every
other generation."
Are you being duped? Ask yourself that question before
condemning those who oppose bombing, invading and occupying Iraq. It
wouldn't be the first time your own government, including your
president, has lied to justify war. It happens in every other
generation.
This nation fought a war against Spain over a century
ago because many in the media parroted the government line that
Spaniards blew up the Battleship Maine in Cuba. Turns out that most
likely was a mistake at best, a big fat lie at worst.
During World War I, Germans were depicted as brutal
barbarians who reveled in nailing babies to fences and gouging out their
eyes, and World War I was billed as the war to end all wars. Instead, it
led directly to World War II, the rise of communism and the Cold War in
the bloodiest century the world has ever known.
Many of today's hawks are too young to remember the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the big fat lie that plunged us into Vietnam
in the 1960s. Look it up. Then there was the Iran-Contra affair, a web
of lies that helped shape the dismal dilemma we face now. Remember
Iran-Contra? That was the covert operation of the Reagan-Bush
administration in the 1980s to sell missiles to a radical Iranian
government in exchange for its help in freeing American hostages held in
Lebanon.
Yes, folks, our government dealt with terrorists and
sold arms to radical Muslim governments. Money from the missiles we sold
to Iran was used to arm the Contras in Central America. Some called them
terrorists, but they were our terrorists, so we called them freedom
fighters.
Reagan's national security adviser, John Poindexter,
was convicted in 1990 of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the
government and destroying evidence in the Iran-Contra scandal. He got
off on grounds that he had been granted immunity from prosecution by the
same Congress he lied to. Incredibly, Poindexter now serves as director
of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, which snoops on the
electronic transactions of ordinary Americans.
It gets more mendacious. While Poindexter, Oliver
North and others were secretly funneling weapons to Iran, our government
also supported Iran's hated enemy, Iraq, selling the Iraqis cluster
bombs and chemicals for weapons of mass destruction. Our government,
including Donald Rumsfeld and others now surrounding President George W.
Bush, shamelessly played both sides against the middle in the 1980s,
promoting trench warfare that resulted in about 1 million dead, crippled
and emotionally scarred Iranians and Iraqis.
Later, our government lied to make its case for the
first Gulf War.
Our government claimed in 1990 to have a photograph
showing 265,000 Iraqi soldiers and 1,500 tanks massed on the Saudi
border ready to overrun that country's oilfields. That claim compelled
the Saudis to let us use their country as a staging ground for the Gulf
War. A prize-winning writer for the St. Petersburg Times went to the
source of the photograph and exposed it as one more lie. The first Bush
bunch also lied to the Kurds and other enemies of Saddam Hussein,
promising we would liberate them if they rose up to oppose that hated
tyrant, Saddam Hussein.
Instead, Kurds were slaughtered by Iraqi helicopters
as U.S. forces withdrew. We mostly protected the Kurds from further
Iraqi vengeance, but the lies keep coming, to the Kurds and to
us.
A New York Times poll shows that 42 percent of
Americans believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001. Our government helped create that impression in its
obsessive drive toward regime change in Iraq.
If you love America as I do, then you owe it to
yourself and your children to seek the truth and reject even the lies
told with the best of intentions by our own leaders. Governments
throughout history have lied, and many folks around the world have
become smart enough to know it.
Maybe that explains why, even as talking heads on CNN
and ABC gushed over how brilliantly Secretary of State Colin
