BETTY CAPLAN / IRAQ WAR Lies coming into the open Oh, and it is preferable to be white and male if you're hoping to get away with it. We have learnt this week what we had all suspected for a long time � that the gun wasn't smoking, and that both US President George Bush and UK Premier Tony Blair used fabricated evidence to convince us that the threat from Iraq was so imminent, it was necessary to go to war. Of course there is nothing new in politicians lying; what is perhaps unprecedented is the scale of the deceit and the perpetrators' confidence in their belief that they could hoodwink the general public. When there only were two stars in the firmament, they provided an odd, uneasy balance which resulted in the Cold War. Now that there is only one, the US is exploiting its favoured position to try to change the world order. Consider this: just a couple of months ago, in May, a young black American reporter called Jayson Blair (no relation to Tony, it would seem), resigned from his post at the New York Times after he had been found to be dishonest. The San Antonio Express blew the whistle on the young cub: "He faked stories and quotes, plagiarised other publications and filed false expense reports to make it appear he was travelling on assignment when he was actually at his home in Brooklyn." Well, fancy that! He had plenty of models to draw on. there was that famous hand-stabbing of Bill Clinton's, insisting that "I did not have sex with that woman". He was naturally referring to Monica Lewinsky, and he was sure he would get away with it, not least because his wife, Hillary stood by him throughout. She offered in defence (she is, after all, a top lawyer) that there was an elaborate Republican conspiracy to destroy her husband's image, a position she still maintains as she smilingly tours the world promoting her new book. When in doubt, find a conspiracy. And before that there was the web created by President Richard Nixon, whose hatred and fear of his Democratic opponents led him to spy on them in a scandal which became known as Watergate. Eventually, the truth came out and he got his comeuppance. He slunk away before he could be impeached. So why worry? Can't we be sure that the forces of truth and good will ultimately overcome the legacy of lies? The point is that even if we could be sure, which we can't, too much damage gets done in the meantime. British and American soldiers are dying daily in Iraq, a country with an ancient civilisation which has been brought to its knees. If Bush and Blair weren't as selective about their use of the Bible, they would know they were attacking the original location of paradise. We were fooled into thinking the war was over in May but it isn't. A nation already suffering due to many years of appalling leadership and a heritage of ill-judged wars, is hurting even more. And then there was something peculiar about this war right from the start: we were only being given casualty numbers on one side. During the last Gulf War, dead Iraqis were deemed worthy of counting, but this time round, the "coalition" decided that it was just too risky to even try. So as far as I know, there aren't proper, official figures for the number of enemy dead. The fact of the matter is that lying becomes a habit; once you've begun, you need to keep it up lest you be found out. There is also the Hollywood tradition which at its worst, polarises and oversimplifies the world into "goodies" and "baddies." Dark-skinned peoples of various types have replaced the Native American Indians as the current baddies, especially those who espouse the religion of Islam. Don't forget that George Bush only recently became a Born Again Christian having been down the path of drink and despair. Like many evangelical converts, his faith and his need to impose it on others remain unshakeable. What's all this got to do with young Blair? It turns out that he wasn't fully qualified or supervised in the job. He had been faulted in his reporting before, but had been allowed to continue. A radical American newspaper called the Black Commentator regretted the way that one man's misdemeanours were used to castigate a whole race: "Media racists immediately sought to somehow blame the very concept of affirmative action for what is, at root, just another instance of white management incompetence." Had Blair been properly supervised and part of a team, the paper claimed, this would never have happened. It seems that he was something of a "token" black in a world which is still dominated by white men who can never be seen as failing. Confronted by the press after proof that Bush lied to the public in his January State of the Union address, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, adopted a casual flippant tone which betrayed the contempt he has for the victims of the war: "Well," he replied. "There is zero, nada, nothing new here. The information on yellow cake did indeed turn out to be incorrect." In that address, the President had told the country that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa (Niger, to be precise) in order to reconstitute its weapons programme, but former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, the one sent on the mission, knew that it was phony. On July 8, Congressman Jan Schakowsky (Democrat, Illinois) challenged the Bush administration in the House: "What else did the Bush administration lie about? Did (it) knowingly deceive us and manufacture intelligence in order to build public support for the invasion of Iraq?" How do the parents of dead or injured US soldiers feel about this? The Pentagon has just released a report (not yet in full) which reveals that the much publicised Private Jessica Lynch incident was not exactly as it seemed either, when she was a member of the 507 unit which was ambushed. She was heroically rescued by her mates in April from the Iraqi hospital where she was recovering from gunshot wounds. Eleven Americans died in the incident, but now it turns out that she wasn't actually shot at at all, and her rescuers didn't have to blast the hospital to smithereens to get her out. They could simply have asked. The report blames a disastrous series of errors for the March 23 attach near Nasiriya after Captain Troy King misunderstood his orders: Ms Caplan is an author and freelance journalist |
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