The Bush Administration - lie mongers extraordinaire

The ”tell a big lie and more people will believe it” quote, first used by Hitler in his autobiographical Mein Kampf, was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich. It could not be easier – if you’re gonna lie to the people, make it damned big, reiterate it as often as you can, and the people will perceive it as the truth, believing no government could tell them such horrid lies.

The OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the modern CIA) described how, during World War Two, the Nazis used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Fast foreword more than 60 years…

The non-profit Centre for Public Integrity has been busy lately with their lie detector. President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condi Rice and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made an estimated 935 brazen and bare faced lies in the two years after the attack on 9/11, and relating to the threat to the USA posed by Saddam Hussein. Needless to say, the continual bombardment of official porkies upon a largely gullible public had the desired effect, namely in whipping up support across the US for the invasion of Iraq.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and his trustworthy sidekicks, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell (remember his speech to the UN?) , Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, assured us unambiguously that Iraq had WMDs and was intent on using them.

The same arguments were promoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, famously with the support of a secret dossier he presented to the British public as his reason for a war with Iraq, and which turned out to be a student’s thesis, written ten year earlier, that MI5 found on the internet. Remember all those stories about Saddam being able to lob a missile at Britain within 45 minutes? Maybe the same people who came up with the lies mouthed by the Bush team can now start adding up the same for the Blair clique. Check out the list of hundreds of links to the articles from the mainstream media on that secret dossier/Iraqgate on the Labour-Watch site.

What is now 100% certain is that Saddam had none of the WMD’s claimed by the Bush administration and neither did he have any links to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous cross-party investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had halted Iraq's nuclear programme over ten years earlier and had made no attempt since to restart it.

On a lie, over 1,168,000 Iraqi civilians have been put to death and at the cost of $hundreds of billions. On a lie, Iraq was mercilessly bombed back into the Stone Age, its infrastructure and culture decimated, and still the bombardment continues. Tens of millions marched and demonstrated throughout the world on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, including an estimated 2 million in London. From the moment Bush and Blair announced their case for the attack on Iraq, Socialists and the left wing, even die hard Labour Party supporters, penned tens of thousands of articles, gave hundreds of lectures, held numerous debates and rallies and vigils and all to no avail. I myself took part in an evening rally in Newcastle that was bombarded with eggs by disgruntled, patriotic workers who had been hooked by the Bush-Blair spiel.

Socialists have been truly vindicated. We argued the WMD case was a lie, along with the crap about Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda. We argued the war was about oil and profits for contractors and about how it fitted in with the profit laden weltanshaung of the Bush administration, that this was part and parcel of the US move to control the oil and gas reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia and at a time when India and China were sizing up the US corporate elite.

There is a lot of truth in the socialist joke: “Q - How can you tell when a politician is lying?; A- when their lips move” . They will lie at every opportunity, indeed, are on record as boasting that they have to tell lies sometimes (sometimes?!). Which is understandable considering the con trick they have to pull off daily and on behalf of the master class. To be kept in a permanent state of subjection, workers have to be lied to at every opportunity, from the cradle to the grave, by our parents, teachers, spiritual leaders, you name it – all of them take part in the lie-mongering business; the bigger, the better the results.

Socialists don’t batter the workers with lies. Our message is simple. Don’t trust leaders and don’t look to us to lead. Question everything! The most dangerous weapon you have is your ability to think, to ask questions, to debate, to refute the official line. You tune this weapon and you can join a movement that no army could stop with all the weapons of murder at its disposal, a movement that will settle the big issue – the one about the ownership of the word – on the battlefield of ideas, where a class-conscious majority will not tolerate bullshit from on high.