Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

ideas. President Johnson believed that the Vietnam War would be different, however, and he lied to us to get us involved. Johnson also knew that America’s major wartime presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR—were its most powerful and revered. He yearned to be among them. Twenty-five years after the Tonkin deception, Communism fell of its own weight, without a shot being fired. And LBJ’s presidency is all but forgotten, except for civil rights and the Medicare and Medicaid bills we are all still paying.

“Grave and Gathering” Deceit

President George W. Bush’s use of deception to trick Congress and the American people into authorizing the Iraq War should go down as one of the deadliest, yet most creative marketing jobs in the history of the world.10 The Bush Administration’s goal, from the beginning of its stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was to go to war with Iraq. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first treasury secretary, who attended the first meeting of Bush’s National Security Council on January 30th 2001, stated, “Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.” According to O’Neill, “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it.”

There’s certainly nothing wrong with “building a case”; lawyers do it all the time. When advocating, it is important for attorneys to highlight arguments that help their clients, while trying to downplay arguments that hurt them. Lawyers, under no circumstances, are permitted to lie to get their way. For some reason, however, we do not hold politicians and presidents to this standard. George W. Bush realized this, and capitalized.

Before September 11th 2001, George W. Bush saw Saddam Hussein as a threat to Middle Eastern and American security, yet did not overtly seek war with Iraq. Even after 9/11, on September 16th 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that “Saddam Hussein’s bottled up at this point.” According to Cheney, there was no evidence linking Iraq to the terrorism and 9/11.

The attacks of September 11th 2001, provided President Bush with an advantage, in that there was overwhelming support for any and all counterterrorism plans put forth by the government. At the time, President Bush was revered and recorded astronomical approval ratings. Yet, public support for a war with Iraq was lacking. In November 2001, 74 percent of Americans favored ousting Saddam Hussein. By the end of Summer 2002, however, only a bare majority of Americans still supported regime change in Iraq. What is striking, though, is that more than 80 percent of Americans believed Iraq supported terrorist organizations poised to attack the United States. Better than 90 percent of Americans believed Iraq possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction. A majority of Americans, contrary to Cheney’s statement made a year earlier, believed that Saddam was linked to the 9/11 attacks.

Americans felt this way about Iraq becausethe Bush Administration conducted an intense campaign to “educate” (lie to) the American public about the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. In December 2001, Cheney returned to Meet the Press and suggested that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, play a role in 9/11. In early 2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was calling for a serious response to regimes that seek to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Cheney declared that Iraq officials had “a robust set of programs to develop their own weapons of mass destruction,” and that “we know [Saddam] has been actively and aggressively doing everything he can to enhance his capabilities.” Cheney also continued to discuss Saddam’s relationship with the terrorists.

In Summer 2002, Bush created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a committee set up to coordinate marketing the war to the public. In August 2002, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Tennessee, Cheney stated that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, against us” (emphasis added). Later, on September 8th 2002, Condoleezza Rice stated the following at the United Nations: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The message was clear: Saddam had WMDs, he could use them at any moment, and he was friends with the terrorists. To any American, this was frightening. Might Saddam’s WMDs have been the same shipments that the U.S. sold to him in 1986 so as to help him defeat Iran in the Iran-Iraq War? If so, the sales were orchestrated by then-and-future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In September 2002, the Bush Administration took its marketing campaign to the next level. On September 12th 2002, at the United Nations, Bush reminded the UN that Saddam brutalized his own people and disregarded UN Security Council resolutions. Bush also threw in a few lies, so as not to veer from the theme of his presidency. He stated that Iraq posed a “grave and gathering danger,” was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and supported terrorism. According to Bush, if the UN did not control Iraq, the United States would dispel the threat militarily.

A little over a week later, on September 20th 2002, Bush called a meeting of the Republican governors at the White House to promote war with Iraq. Bush went through all the usual talking points but also emphasized the importance of promoting liberty, individual freedom, and democracy around the world. According to Bush, “Afghanistan and Iraq will lead [the Middle East] to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.” There is nothing wrong with promoting liberty and individual freedom; in fact, it is encouraged. However, the idea that a country, through the use of military force, can