[alexamenos]

Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin

that comedy would mean they are bad at it, not good at it.

It would mean this one instance was transparent. My question was 'when did you recognize that the event was propaganda?' My point is that if a person doesn't immediately recognize their very bad propaganda as such, odds are that person isn't going to recognize their better shots either.

So...ummm....when did you realize the staged event was just some good ole propaganda? This is a rhetorical question, but if the answer is something like 'I've only recently learned that this was a staged army psy-op event?', then you're probably not paying close enough attention to some things.

I thought we'd been flying missions in Iraq and occasionally bombing stuff since the whole Kuwait thing.

yes we had -- in fact I think it's fair to say that Gulf War I never really ended, it just stopped getting much press.

but if we want to break the gulf war into two parts, I'd say that part 2 began in earnest in the spring of '02 -- by this time the decision to go to war had definitely been made and mobilizaiton efforts were in full effect. Like I said, I suspect the initial plan was to really roll things out in a big way by the early fall, but they hit some logistical snags and started with a slower, more covert type of rolling start instead.

lessee if I can find something.....it's been a while, and I'm working from memory.....ok, from our friends in great brit....

THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war....

The Ministry of Defence figures, provided in response to a question from Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, show that despite the lack of an Iraqi reaction, the air war began anyway in September [2002] with a 100-plane raid.

...Tommy Franks, the allied commander, has since admitted this operation was designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences in the same way as the air attacks that began the 1991 Gulf war.

I think most people can agree, whether they supported the war or not, that 100 plane raids aimed at knocking out military installations are acts of war. (this was 100 planes on one day, and this sort of thing happened most days between September '02 and March of '03).

Bear in mind that this was happening before congress voted on their 'authorization of force' or whatever that nonsense was about and before Token Powell told his mountain of lies to the UN. We literally started the war before we started the debate about whether to go to war.

My point, bearing in mind that it's tough for me to prove a negative, is that you can scour the mainstream media, or any middle-of-the-road second tier kind of thing, and you'll never, ever, ever find one single contemporaneous statement that the US was at war with Iraq prior March of '03. You will find plenty of statements that read something like:

"Today US government officials worked diligently to convince Saddam not to cause a war...meanwhile US armed forces blasted the crap out of a bunch iraqis."

But these statements are absurd on their face, which is kind of the essence of propaganda -- to make the absurd reality. And I guess I should say that my larger point is that during the early stages of the Iraq war, we were like fish swimming in a sea of absurdities such as these. We were like fish who no longer noticed the water.