How Is the World Ruled and Led to War?

[mohammad]

by Robert Higgs

In the late summer of 2002, as the Bush administration continued to
peddle plausible reasons for the war it had already decided to launch
against Iraq, administration spokespersons placed heavy emphasis on the
threat posed by Saddam's alleged nuclear-weapons program. The
government's efforts received a big boost on Sunday, September 8, when
The New York Times published a story by Judith Miller and Michael
Gordon that quoted administration sources to the effect that "Iraq has
stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a
worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." The proof
consisted of Iraq's attempted purchase of "specially designed aluminum
tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of
centrifuges to enrich uranium."

Naturally the imagery of a mushroom cloud found a place in the article.
Americans all understand and many react viscerally to the image of a
mushroom cloud. Hardly anything serves more effectively to marshal
public fear and thus to cause people to clamor for the protection their
government purports to provide.

The rest of the story is described as follows in James Bamford's
excellent book A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of
America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp.
324 25.

As if the entire event had been scripted, administration officials had
all agreed days earlier to appear on the Sunday talk shows that same
morning. Once the cameras clicked on, they made generous use of the
allegations contained in the article, now free from worries about
releasing classified information. It was a perfect scheme leak the
secrets the night before so you can talk about them the next morning.

In separate appearances on Meet the Press, CNN's Late Edition, Fox
News, and CBS's Face the Nation, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld each played essentially the same role in
this made-for-TV farce.

Bamford concludes:

The series of events produced exactly the sort of propaganda coup that
the White House Iraq Group [WHIG] had been set up to stage-manage.
First OSP [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] supplies false or
exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly
reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the
story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the
unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.

It now seems clear that the administration's allegations of Iraq's
growing nuclear threat helped substantially in bringing many in
Congress and among the general public to support the "preventive" U.S.
attack on Iraq.

As I read Bamford's account of these events, I could not help recalling
Karl Kraus's immortal quip: "How is the world ruled and led to war?
Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those lies when they see them
in print."

July 6, 2005

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is
Against Leviathan.

URL: http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs33.html