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Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin
we could not have done it before making war.
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We also couldn't have had
this photo-opportunity.
Do you realize you're spinning propaganda? That's kind of like lying about catching a fish and then exaggerating the size of a fish you didn't catch.
Firdos Square was presented as one thing when the reality was quite different. It was inherently and purposefully deceitful. The government and the media were complicit in the deceit -- it was Pravda, USA. (and by many accounts, the US produces way better propaganda than the commies and their party press)
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well, if bombing Iraq is what you want to call war, then we were at war with Iraq long before that, but the government wasn't hiding it. They were reporting the bombings.
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I think you're missing the degree to which the level of bombings and intensity of covert operations ramped up in mid-2002. This wasn't the same old box them in and starve them out campaign that had gone on during the clinton years. 2002 was the beginning of the re-invasion. Also, daily 100 plane raids dropping bombs on another country's military installations is unequivocally war. One of the logical consequences of calling unequivocal acts of war 'war' is that the absurdity of the State's propaganda becomes all the more apparent (and the aim of propaganda is to make the absurd seem reasonable).
So I'm not talking about the government hiding things -- I'm talking about propaganda (and the overwhelming degree to which absurd propaganda was absorbed by the masses). The propaganda and the reality were grossly at odds with one another.
The propaganda at the time was that the US Government was doing all it could to
avoid war. The reality is that the US Government was already bombing the crap out of Iraq by the early fall of 2002. The propaganda at the time was that Iraq Part II was about 9-11, a crucial part of the war on terror. The reality is that this war which began in the early 1990's didn't have a freaking thing to do with 9-11-2001, nonetheless...
70% of folks in the US believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9-11. <-- This is a fact, an overwhelming majority of people really believed this. A person doesn't have to be a stark raving mad tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist to ask how 70% of folks in the US came to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9-11.
Suffice it to say, 70% of the people in the US didn't spontaneously and independently conclude this.
I think 70% came to believe this because of a very successful propaganda campaign. My conclusion is not based on the
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (as you've suggested). The propaganda campaign began in October of 2001 when anonymous government officials began "leaking" the notion that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks and it evolved into a pr bombardment making an emotional connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11.
If somebody has a better explanation as to why an overwhelming majority of people came to believe something which was a) factually baseless; b) absurd on it's face; and c) highly conducive to selling a war with iraq, then I'd like to hear it.