Skip Nav | Home | Mobile | Editorial Guidelines | Mission Statement | About Us | Contact | Help | Security | Support Us

World

So what did go wrong in Iraq?

Ian Fantom | 16.05.2008 10:52 | Analysis | Iraq | World

An analysis of how Britain lost the propaganda war on the weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq war was wrong from the start. No sooner had the military embarked on their armed invasion in 2003 than the propaganda war was all but lost.

“I’m surprised they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction”, commented a friend to me recently. “Well, there weren’t any”, I replied. “That’s not the point”, he said, “They could easily have invented them”.

In other words, the big lie wasn’t big enough.

It was Adolf Hitler who, in Mein Kampf, first made known the propaganda technique of the ‘big lie’. Goebbels later explained, “The English follow the principal that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

The propaganda wars in Britain and the US took different forms. In the US the emphasis was on regime change, to get rid of a bad guy. That wouldn’t have worked in Britain, and so Tony Blair had to emphasise the supposed military threat coming from Saddam’s war machine.

Before the outbreak of hostilities, Bush and Blair managed to coordinate policy. The now famous Downing Street Memo revealed some of the wheeler dealings behind this coordinated policy. The head of Britain’s external military intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove, had reported, on returning from Washington, that the US regime was fitting the facts around the policy. They invented the weapons of mass destruction.

However, once in Iraq, they had to coordinate two propaganda policies much more intimately. They had to pedal the myth that they were bringing democracy to Iraq, whilst at the same time justifying their invasion on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction.

To carry the lie through on weapons of mass destruction, they would have needed to have found them. Yet Britain was very much the junior partner, and the US had its own ideas. They sent in Hans Blix. The easiest option for the US was to let Hans Blix search hard for weapons of mass destruction and finally have to accept that there had been some sort of intelligence failure. They had still needed to get rid of a bad guy, and that had been the real justification for the intervention.

In Britain, however, that could not work. Blair was left out on a limb. All he could do was to try to convince the British people that he had really believed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and hope that the people would understand when that turned out not to be true.

Then, as the unthinkable became thinkable, he would move on to sow the seeds of peace and democracy in other ways, whilst his accomplice and supposed cabinet rival could credibly take over the onerous burden of restoring peace and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and of bringing the troops home to friends and family, believing that they had been risking their lives in fighting for a worthy and honorable cause.

Ian Fantom
- e-mail: first_name@surname.org.uk
- Homepage: http://esperantolobby.org

Comments

Hide the following 3 comments

Nothing went wrong

16.05.2008 23:39

It all turns out as it was intended to be
The internecine war beween betweem Sunnis and Shias was all whipped up. What an absurd argument anyway, on the descendants of certain caliphates! Anyway this civil war was whipped up on the basis of False Flags - the Summarra mosque, the SAS guys with their carload of explosives going to blast Basra under a suicide bombing guise - for precisely the reason of dividing the Kingdom and establishing military bases there. It's all so obvious

dh


War on terror?

17.05.2008 00:28

Where is that then?
What is this war on terror?
Sounds like you're fighting a war inside your own mind/head.
Killing a few foreigners with beards and children.
Well done brave man.
Come and fight me , I,m invisible , you,ll never win fool.
Che forever!

daggle


Indeed, nothing went wrong

20.05.2008 15:26

The military campaign went to plan.

What did go wrong was the propaganda campaign. All they can do now is to maintain the Big Lie, however ridiculous it looks, until it crumbles. It is crumbling, because the lie wasn't big enough.

And then they will have to do the same over the question of why we are in Afghanistan. Then comes the truth on 9/11.

Regards, Ian Fantom.

Ian Fantom


Publish

Publish your news

Do you need help with publishing?

/regional publish include --> /regional search include -->

World Topics

Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista

Kollektives

Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

Server Appeal Radio Page Video Page Indymedia Cinema Offline Newsheet

secure Encrypted Page

You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.

If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

IMCs


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech