Noam Chomsky

The Iraq War has been easily absorbed into the powerful doctrinal system, illustrating George Orwell’s observation eighty years ago that, in free societies, inconvenient facts can be suppressed without the use of force. After twenty years, one would be hard put to find a single sentence anywhere near the mainstream affirming the obvious: the US-UK invasion of Iraq was the worst crime of this century, the kind of crime for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg — or even a sentence affirming that it was a crime. It has been refashioned as a benign effort to rescue the Iraqi people from a terrible dictator and to bring them the gift of democracy, an effort that unfortunately failed.

Omitted are a few of those easily suppressed inconvenient facts; for example, that the United States supported Saddam Hussein through his worst crimes, even the 1988 Halabja massacre. The love affair persisted into the first Bush administration, which sent a high-level senatorial delegation to convey the president’s good wishes to Saddam and inform him that he should disregard criticisms in the out-of-control US press. George H. W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. Another inconvenient fact is that this fairy tale was invented after the wrong answer was given to what had been called the “single question” — whether Iraq would abandon its nonexistent WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs.