Of course Sen. John McCain was right when he said, “whether he [defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel] really believes that the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War. That clearly is not correct – in fact, it’s bizarre.” Yes, in McCain's weekly "Somebody look at me!" tour of the Sunday morning shows, he said something completely correct, that Hagel was wrong about the surge in Iraq being the biggest blunder since the Vietnam War. How ridiculous! Clearly the title of biggest blunder since Vietnam goes to the invasion of Iraq itself.
Hmm, maybe that's not quite what McCain, who was last right about a foreign policy matter sometime back in, um, ... anyway, maybe that wasn't quite what he meant. But it's what he should have meant. We just passed the ten year anniversary of massive protests all over the world opposing the neocons' invasion of Iraq and were almost to the anniversary of the invasion itself. How did it go? Well, I won't be surprised if conservative media leave it unmarked, and I sure don't expect them to celebrate it. Or can even the conservative bubble be that delusional?
Ten years on, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of getting out of Afghanistan, the travails of the new governments of the Arab Spring, and whether Obama is any different from Bush, and forget the massive deception used to trick the country into going to war. We need to look back on it and realize anew that not only were the neocons the biggest liars ever to get a hold of governmental power but no, Obama isn't like Bush much at all.
By "neocons" I'm using the term more broadly than just PNAC and The Weekly Standard and the fools Donald Rumsfeld brought into the Defense Department, and including the Bush administration itself. The administration brought the neocons into government and implemented their policy, so they're covered with the same blood. Bush had his own obsession with Iraq, so he doesn't get off on a plea of listening to bad advice. He picked those guys.
If you need a reminder of the phony sales job to sell the invasion, and you do after all this time, you must watch MSNBC's Hubris, shown last night during the Rachel Maddow Show, but then scroll below the squiggly orange thing because there's more:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The embed is just the first segment (click the video to see the other segments). The program covers the deceptions used to sell the war from shortly after 911 until the invasion. It seemed familiar again while I was watching it, but afterward, something else occurred to me: conservatives were already lost in the ideological conspiracy mindset. I'm sure many ardent supporters of the invasion would deny they're at all similar to global warming deniers, birthers, tenthers, and the people who thought four investigations of Vince Foster's suicide just weren't enough. Yes, Vince Foster --- this thinking seems to go back to the 90's, at least. Essentially, what happened was cherrypicking. They picked, or are picking, the evidence that supports what they already firmly believe, and ignoring or denying anything contradictory.
I'm not saying the neocons didn't lie. They did ... and they believed what they were saying. How can those things be simultaneously true? Once it appeared there were no WMD in Iraq, I suspected the Bush administration would take some American weapons, change the markings, drop them in a hole in Iraq, put a TV camera over it, and say, "Look, we found them!". I started doubting my suspicions when time went on and not only weren't any weapons found or "found", but the right clung to every rumor of weapons being moved to Syria before the invasion and played up every cache of decrepit gas shells. Those weren't the actions of people who knew there was nothing there. They seemed to really believe their own propaganda. How could they be saying what they really believed, and be lying at the same time?
That's where cherrypicking comes in. They told us about the aluminum tubes, but withheld the fact the engineers who examined them said they were for rockets and wrong for centrifuges. They told us about the yellowcake uranium from Niger, but not that the CIA said the supporting documents were fabricated. They told us they had sources who knew about WMD and Iraq's involvement in 911, but not that the sources were either unreliable or were tortured into providing information. They told us other nations' intelligence services had the same information as the Bush administration, but not that they were getting their information from the Bush administration. They told us the New York Times discovered the same things the administration was claiming, without saying the administration planted the story (this is why you should never believe anonymous sources saying what the organization they're part of would want said, and also why Judith Miller was consigned to Fox News).
So yes, they lied, not by saying Iraq was behind 911 when they knew it wasn't true, but by providing only the evidence that supported their claims and not that which contradicted them and, as it turned out, the contradictory evidence was far stronger. Since they were sure they were right, they ignored it like a climate change denier ignoring thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean or a tenther ignoring the supremacy clause.
If the neocons wanted to privately indulge that fault all of us are prone to at times, selecting only supporting evidence of our beliefs, that's their business. But they turned their beliefs into justification for deceiving the rest of us, and hundreds of thousands of people died as a result.
That's beyond faulty logic and into criminal behavior.
As if you needed a sad thought on the tenth anniversary, as much as we hope and swear we'll never let this mistake be repeated, it's happened before. Makes it hard for me to believe it won't happen again. There has never been such a concerted campaign of deception, but the ignoring of inconvenient evidence is pretty much how we got "Remember the Maine!" The failure of congressmen to demand a good answer to, "Are you sure the attack happened?" is how we got the Mexican War and the Tonkin Gulf resolution. A big majority of senators voted for war with Iraq even with Robert Byrd, who voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, standing on the floor telling them how much he regretted that vote and they were doing it all over again.
So it's impossible for me to say we can stop it happening again. But we must try. So don't let the tenth anniversary pass without reminders of the most deceptive sales campaign by any US president.
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project