Top 10 Lies of the Iraq War

10. Jessica Lynch was a US heroine who fought her way to safety
Usage: The story of an all-American heroine, emerging at a crucial moment of the conflict, to provide good news and the perfect embodiment of “right vs wrong”. Nothing can influence public opinion quite like Hollywood-style patriotism.
Principal liar: American Media, The Washington Post and Donald Rumsfeld
How barefaced? “They used me to symbolise all this stuff. It’s wrong,” said Lynch afterwards. “I don’t know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things.”

Private Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, was captured when her company took a wrong turning just outside Nasiriya. Nine of her fellow-soldiers were killed and Private Lynch was taken to the local hospital. On April 1st, 2003, US special forces stormed the hospital, capturing the “dramatic” events on a night vision camera that was played in the initial press briefing on April 2nd. In the same briefing it was claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated – but still managed to unload a couple of clips from her semi-automatic as she fled for safety. “Some brave souls put their lives on the line to make this happen,” said General Vincent Brooks, “loyal to a creed that they know that they’ll never leave a fallen comrade.”

However, the truth then emerged: she was not able to shoot at all because her weapon was jammed, her injuries were due to a car accident (with another US vehicle), and the spectacular rescue was exposed as unnecessary as Iraqi doctors in Nasirya had already offered to hand her over – and there wasn’t a solitary armed person remaining in the hospital. On April 24, 2007, Lynch testified in front of Congress that the media and the military lied for their own gain. “They should have found out the facts before they spread the word like wildfire,” she said. “The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”


 9. US not interested in a permanent presence in Iraq
Use: Disavowing the accusation that the war in Iraq is basically another leg of the American Empire World Tour, the permanence of the ten military bases spanning the length of the country is openly refuted by the administration.
Principal liar: Donald Rumsfeld
How barefaced? The statements to the contrary were unambiguous, and directly contradict the consistent policies of the principal Iraq war architects.

Donald Rumsfeld added to a growing list of Mespotamia-sized fibs when, in April, 2003, he said, “I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed… We have no desire to be there for long periods, we simply don’t. And that’s just a cold, hard fact.”

Rumsfeld’s ability to finesse his statements with phrases like “at the present time” or “not that I can recall” can’t mask the deliberate deception. In fact, a permanent presence in the country was discussed in neo-con circles long before September 11th. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think-tank of future Bush cronies like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, authored a report during the Clinton presidency that stated: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Of course, there were other diplomatic words for “permanent” that began to emerge as concrete became the material of choice at US bases across the country. In April 2003, Bush team members were already talking about “a long-term military relationship… that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the region.” In March 2004, “access” became “enduring bases”. These then became four or five “contingency operating bases”.


8. Foreign fighters are to blame for the insurgency
Use: Seeking to explain the ferocity of the resistance and the fact that Iraqis don’t appear to be handing out flowers and candy to troops as Dick Cheney predicted, all violence is being blamed on external forces.
Principal liars: Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush
How barefaced? Iraq is a country of 25 million people, one million of which have died since the war, four million of whom are displaced. To blame that on a few hundred Syrians is little short of ridiculous.

“No one predicted the level of the insurgency,” Donald Rumsfeld said in 2005, echoing another chief lie of the administration. “Partly it’s a function of money. Partly it’s a function of what the Syrians and the Iranians are doing.” He even went on to say that the activities of the Syrians will shape the length of the US army’s stay in Iraq. President Bush added to the anti-Syrian climate in the 2006 State of the Union address by directly threatening the regime over its “support for terrorists”, and even widened his attack in a radio speech that said “the world’s terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror.”

Of course, the actual figures tell a different story. The hardly liberal Center for Strategic and International Studies said the percentage of foreign fighters accounted for between four and ten per cent of terrorists, and in March 2005, Commander of US Central Command, General John Abizaid, said most of the insurgents were Iraqis. “Coalition people often exaggerate the role of foreign infiltrators and downplay the role of Iraqi resentment in the insurgency,” said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official. “It makes the government’s counter-insurgency efforts seem more legitimate, and it links what’s going on in Iraq to the war on terrorism.”


7. The UN inspectors were a vital part of building Bush’s decision to go to war
Use: The fact that Hans Blix was dispatched to reveal proof of nuclear and biological weapons, or programmes to build them, was proof that Bush didn’t want war – he wanted to remove a threat. His subsequent work would, whatever the outcome, highlight that Saddam had them, or was hiding them.
Principal liar: Tony Blair, US weapons chief David Kay
How barefaced: This was effectively an acknowledgment of their own deception; they used the inspections team to place Iraq in a Catch-22 situation – weapons means war because Saddam is dangerous, no weapons means war because Saddam is a master of deception.

At the urgings of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the US agreed that inspections should be sent to Iraq to discover the “truth” about Saddam’s various weapons’ programmes – and to provide a veneer of respectability for the impending invasion. In four months between November 2002 to March 2003, Hans Blix and his team visited 400 sites, mostly unannounced, and produced a series of comprehensive reports on his (non)findings. Although he, like the Bush administration, firmly believed Saddam had something to hide, his regular bulletins merely exposed gaps in knowledge, not the definitive proof the White House sought.

Already set on the path to war, Bush and company took a three-pronged approach to the inspections: they attempted to pressure Blix into reporting what they wanted to hear; misrepresent whatever was reported to support their position; and when all else has failed, contend that the lack of evidence merely supports their position that Saddam can’t be trusted.

Despite the UN suggesting inspections would go on for some time, and the urgings of critics in Congress and the Security Council for them to do so, the US began to push for their termination as early as January as the no-show of WMDs was becoming increasingly embarrassing. Justifying the policy, David Kay, the main weapons hunter after the invasion, said in January 2003: “Let’s not give [Iraq] more time to cheat and retreat.” The ultra-right Brookings Institute lamented in the same month, in a piece describing the inspections as a “trap”, that “every inspection of an Iraqi site that finds nothing reinforces the misimpression that Iraq has complied.”

Asked at a later date about the war, Bush said he launched the attack because Saddam had kicked out the inspectors. Another lie, of course.


6. No one predicted the insurgency…
Use: Another outing for the “but no one knew” defence, the war planners were quick to state that the levels of violence were unprecedented – and therefore no one is accountable for the failure to plan for it, or the shortage of troop numbers it exposed.
Principal liar: Dick Cheney
How barefaced? Repeated intelligence warnings predicted the exact outcome of an invasion of Iraq, all of which were ignored to better sell the “ease” of the war. “

In July 2006, pathological liar Dick Cheney said on Meet the Press, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered,” he was actually responding to a question about lie number five in our list, his claim a year earlier that the insurgency was “in it’s last throes”. He was, as it turned out, lying again.

On the eve of the invasion, there were two separate reports by the National Intelligence Council, a body comprised of senior intelligence figures and analysts. One stated that any “conflict could spark factional violence and an anti-US insurgency”, while the other predicted an occupation would “increase popular sympathy for terrorist objectives”.
The CIA also warned the administration. In January 2003, a report was handed to the president which, thanks to a leak by senior official Paul R Pillar, we know read “rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organisations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or coalition forces.”

Of course, ignoring the advice in 2003 was entirely deliberate. Dominic Johnson, author of Overconfidence and War, stated that “officials played down potential postwar problems in order to garner support for launching the war”, while Anthony Cordesman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies claims the White House “discouraged such analysis”.


5. … and in any case, it’s in its last throes
Use: This was the Vice President’s attempt to calm the fears of an increasingly uneasy American public about the course of the Iraq war.
Principal liar: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld
How barefaced? Hideously and ineptly conceived, this falsehood was uttered more in hope than expectation and was based on nothing more than wishful thinking – as tens of thousands of sectarian-motivated deaths prove.

Mid-way through 2005, as the sectarian savagery accelerated and more and more US troops were coming home in unseen coffins, Dick Cheney proudly declared in May on CNN’s Larry King Live that the insurgency, despite a marked spike, was “in its last throes”.

Ably supported by Donald Rumsfeld, who proudly declared in April 2005 that “suicide attacks, whether in Okinawa or in Baghdad are not a sign of strength, they’re a sign of desperation”, Cheney touted the current party line. Unfortunately, it was easy to see through. May 2005 had been the single bloodiest month in Iraq since the invasion, with at least 672 civilians – up from 364 in April – and 79 US troops killed. It was also the month that the US Marines launched the unsuccessful Operation Matador in Western Iraq, failing to regain control of the territory on the Syrian border and losing 31 soldiers in the process.

In September, after a spate of suicide bombings in the capital, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said “Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration”. The bloodshed of 2006, and the onset of ethnic cleansing, further exposed the lie, which eventually prompted the administration to announce, two years after Cheney’s promise, a 30,000-troop surge to quell the violence. Nearly three years on, “last” and “throes” are both laughable in their inaccuracy.


4. Mission accomplished
Use: A slogan that appeared on a banner behind President George W Bush on 
May 1, 2003, as he gave a speech aboard the USS Lincoln declaring that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended”.
Principal liar: George Bush
How barefaced? Five years after the statement, the 140,000 American soldiers stationed in Iraq may disagree that the war is over.

Five years after the commander-in-chief’s assurances to his troops that their work in Iraq was done, the battles have been neither sporadic nor on a small scale. Locked in street-to-street guerilla warfare, the number of American military deaths following the speech (and until April 2008) was 3,821 – compared to less than 140 Americans before it. In other words, more than 96 per cent of the American military fatalities occurred after the bald-faced lie. The official number of wounded American soldiers exceeds 29,000, seven times the number of injuries prior to the speech.

As for the process of rebuilding the country, the mission has barely started. The only secure building project on time and on budget, according to USA Today, is the American embassy complex in the Green Zone, built on acreage the size of 80 football fields, with its own power generator and water treatment facility. The Iraqis have to be thrilled about the amazing job accomplished by their liberators.

Less than a year after the stunt, Bush’s close advisor Karl Rove admitted “I wish the banner was not up there”. The White House website has cropped the “Mission Accomplished” banner out of the photos taken on that day, and in the short-term memory world of George Bush, that’s all 
it takes to retroactively change history. Minus the half million fatalities.


3. Saddam had operational ties with al-Qaeda prior to September 11th, 2001
Usage: Capitalising on the 9/11 events and using the terrorism rhetoric as a means of scaring and deceiving the American public into an unnecessary war.
Principal liar: Dick Cheney (again), George Tenet
How barefaced? To most observers, the notion that a secular dictator and a Sunni extremist would find common ground was absurd – but in the States, one Arab could be made to look much like another.

Following 9/11, CIA director George Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with President Bush that there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, however, wanted to justify their long-planned war on Iraq, so they initiated a secret programme to re-examine the evidence and marginalise the CIA. The Office for Special Plans was less of an intelligence gathering unit and more a team to harvest and distribute as much anti-Iraq information it could find – or invent. In many cases, Cheney’s office would leak this intelligence to the main papers, such as The New York Times, and then justify his political positions on television – by referencing New York Times reports!

On December 9, 2001, Dick Cheney told Meet the Press that Iraq was harbouring Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official before the attacks, in April 2000 in Prague.  On September 14, 2003, he went further: “We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the 90s.” In an interview with National Public Radio in January, 2004, he said there was “overwhelming evidence” of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

The spin did its job. A Harris poll conducted in April 2004, fully one year after the Iraq war, reported that 49 per cent of Americans believed that “clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda has been found”.
But on June 17th, 2004 the 9/11 Commission reported the obvious: it has found no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

On March 21, 2006, Bush sought to distance himself from the allegation of any link. He said: “I don’t think we ever said – at least I know I didn’t say – that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein.” He seemed to have forgotten his war-waging letter to Congress on March 21st, 2003: “I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organisations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorised, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.


2. This war is not about oil
Usage: The ongoing attempt to mask the war’s real intentions – securing the energy resources of the Middle East – by trying to present the occupation of a sovereign state as a necessary step towards a peaceful, terrorist-free region.
Principle liar: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair
How barefaced? All the principal architects of the war are oilmen and within hours of the fall of the Iraq regime, US soldiers surround the ministry of oil – ignoring all others.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” said Alan Greenspan recently. But few needed America’s elder statesman of finance to know how big of a lie that is: America has been seeking secure 
its Middle East energy supply for the better part of a century.

When, in 1973, the price of a barrel of oil jumped from $3 to $10, Henry Kissinger wrote an article in Harper’s magazine entitled “Seizing Arab Oil”. In 1980, Jimmy Carter declared the Persian Gulf a zone of US influence and created the Rapid Deployment Force. Fast forward a decade or so, and the US is increasingly vulnerable to declining stocks as Indian and Chinese demand begins to rise exponentially. The National Energy Policy Development Group – aka the “energy task force” – headed by Dick Cheney decided that the country sitting on top of the world’s second largest oil reserve was not only an appealing target but a necessity for the US to maintain its global domination.

In July 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer denied to US journalists that the war had “anything to do with oil”. He echoed Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld, who in November of the previous year told CBS News that “It has literally nothing to do with oil”. It seemed a strange conclusion when US troops secured the oil ministry in central Baghdad and left tens of thousands of looters to help themselves to priceless artifacts from the nation’s museums.

A few months after the Iraq occupation, the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, was asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: “We just had no choice in Iraq… the country swims on a sea of oil.”

General John Abizaid, former commander of the abovementioned Central Command has repeatedly argued that the US would need “to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq” in order to protect “the free flow of goods and resources”. But in an October 15th, 2007 roundtable discussion at Stanford University he was more candid when it came to the Iraq occupation: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that”.


1. Everything Colin Powell said at the UN
Usage: Badgered into pressing for a second UN resolution before attacking Iraq, Colin Powell presented the case of Saddam’s weapons programmes to the United Nations on February 5th, 2003. It was meant to be the nail in the coffin of the anti-war movement.
Principal liar: Colin Powell, fawning press, the CIA
How barefaced? Not only has the speech been clinically picked apart by intelligence experts, but the facts in Iraq soon exposed the falsehoods of practically every line. It was no surprise that Powell began distancing himself from the text within months of the invasion.

It has since been described by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell, as the bleakest moment of his life. Powell himself said it is his one major regret from his time in office. The US Secretary of State’s speech in February 2003 to the UN General Assembly marked a low point in international diplomacy and, seen through the cold glare of history, is one of the most embarrassing moments for the United States on the world stage. A collection of dated intelligence reports, flawed fact sheets, Iraqi defectors’ coerced testimony, blurred satellite shots, poorly-taped phone taps and an awful lot of supposition were unleashed by Powell in a presentation that, for those with a smattering of knowledge on the subject, bordered on the farcical.

Not that the mainstream press in America noticed. While the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung cynically noted that it would be difficult to convict a chicken thief on the evidence presented, in America the mood was very different. “The cumulative effect was stunning,” purred The Washington Post’s Mary McCory. “I’m persuaded.” Richard Cohen, from the same paper, said the evidence was “bone-chilling”. Dan Rather, CBS veteran news anchor, admitted on air he was “impressed. And who wouldn’t be?” Even more ludicrous, David Gergen on CNN said that Powell had delivered “conclusive, compelling evidence” that “effectively destroyed the arguments of the opponents of the president’s policy.”

Some five years on, the evidence wasn’t just wrong, it was laughable, and constitutes one of the biggest collective falsehoods ever peddled either in front of the American public or the world community.

The Top 10 list was published in its full version in the March 2008 issue as a part of a special section under the headline "Iraq: five years and counting". For a full version of this feature, see NOX 20.