Surely you can produce examples of obviously false things that are close to universally believed by “the West” then?
Usually when people make this claim they go on to list actually ambiguous or actually controversial topics.
Usually when people make this claim they go on to list actually ambiguous or actually controversial topics.
These were universally believed by "the West".
Doesn't the lack of newer, more convincing examples tell you a lot about the veracity of the claim?
Edit: didn't see the missile gap thing, did you add it later? AFAIK, that was more of a lie by the US Air Force to increase their funding and actual government officials believed it.
I did add the missile gap later, I am sorry. What does it matter who's lie it was? Kennedy ran with it.
In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands.
The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”.
People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world?
I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.
I think our overreaction to 9/11 is itself an example of manipulation by media. We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades and those nations didn’t get PTSD from our actions. This leads me to think that our over the top outrage was partially fueled by media narratives.
Please name a few examples of US peacetime attacks on civilian populations
Nevertheless, you should read up on the history of our shenanigans in Latin America. One example: while Americans didn’t do the actual killing and torture of Catholic priests and nuns our proxies did. You should also read up on things we funded the Iraqis to do in their war against Iran. Paying someone to do your dirty deeds is just as bad as doing them yourself. We did shoot down an Iranian airliner and later promoted the captain of the ship. We weren’t at war with Cambodia but did terrible things to that country during the Vietnam war. Bay of Pigs.
Look at who we funded and ended up enabling to gain control of Afghanistan during Soviet Union’s involvement there.
Even granting the premise of “paying is equal to doing,” none of your examples are anything like 9/11. The defining characteristics of 9/11 are obviously these: peacetime, intentionally targeted at civilians, killed a large number of civilians.
The best way to absolve a country of guilt is actually to make divorced-from-reality equivocations so that every less than ideal outcome looks equally evil, equally preventable, etc. The US has done plenty of truly atrocious stuff overseas and at home, silly arguments like “the US committed decades of 9/11-style acts” is counterproductive if your mission is accountability.
I can’t point to a single act that satisfies your criteria. The U.S. does not wage peacetime violence in the same way that terrorist groups do. We prefer to do the damage over time. We prefer to avoid headline capturing violence. But the victims don’t care and the point I made is not diminished by this. Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.
2000 people weren’t killed in a single day in Nicaragua in the 80s. We did it over time and in a sustained way. The Nicaraguans don’t obsess about how this changed the whole world or desire to go on a 20 year killing spree in reaction to what we did.
Different claim than this one: “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades”
And FWIW other places couldn’t overreact the way the US did even if they wanted to, and I’m sure on more than zero occasions they did. The US is a phenomenally dangerous giant lumbering around. Don’t presume that others would do much better if they were equipped the same way we happen to be.
I know why they invaded Iraq. It has nothing to do with 9/11 PTSD nor oil except as a secondary or tertiary benefit.
Whether or not the actual reason is a good one is another debate. But that doesn't change the fact of the WMD lie, but most importantly that of the observation that the Press is an in-total propaganda arm of at least one sect of the government. Which has a lot of downstream implications for the twenty plus years since.
The WMD lie shouldn't be the "well, it was twenty years ago" example. It should be the "look what they were willing to do, they can never be trusted" example.
Apologizing after the fact of a willful action of that type isn't an apology. It's a vain attempt to reduce consequence for themselves. If only reduced trust, which people like yourself try to still stem citing that lame "apology".
Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03.
Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03.
So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.
I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification.
[1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.
Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!
I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah.
That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence)
For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation
Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS.
And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.
Yeah it’s astounding anyone involved in Iran-Contra was allowed anywhere near a seat of power.
To be clear, I’m obviously not treating it as if it’s muddy now. I am saying that it wasn’t that clear then, for reasons that include people simply lying.
> Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse?
I think they may have worked themselves up a little with their what-if scenarios (their concern was what he might do with a bunch of ifs) and, further, selected that in particular for the infamous open letter to Clinton because most of the rest of what they were selling had no urgency, even by what-if standards.
They had a fundamental problem with that requirement, in fact, that there be exigent need for US intervention before we undertake it. Their whole deal was that we should embrace and proactively enforce hegemony (because the Pax Americana’s just that good for the world—it’d be immoral not to, you see!).
I would guess some mix of genuine ideology and connection to a MIC that wanted those sweet Cold War dollars back and to whom they were receptive (for those ideological reasons), were behind that, but I don’t know and it was enough people that I expect motivations varied.
[edit] I should perhaps add that I’m not categorically opposed to the kind of thing they were getting at. Is the Pax Americana some greater-good thing with breaking a few eggs for? Maybe! It really might be! I’m at least open to the idea. I pull the lever on the trolly problem all day long.
My opposition to their ideas had (has… a lot of these folks are still kickin’ around) less to do with some wholesale disagreement with the very notion of what they were about, and more to do with the specifics of what they wanted to do having a history of costly failure, of that being a risky sort of road to begin with, and of these people in particular having a history of making a huge mess of things while having their hand in the till and technocratically lying to manipulate a democracy into “what’s best for it” (consistent with the means-to-the-end greater-good thing! But far, far too dangerous)
It’s very hard to know things, and it’s easy to forget how hard it is to know things in retrospect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_March_2003_anti-war_protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
Still it was universal enough to invade a country for no proper reason whatsoever. Hell, much of the non-believers joined the conflict later on ( even the French ).
The fact Earth is a sphere isn't universally believed either.