The Biggest Lie About Iraq

“Honesty, is such a lonely word…” -Billy Joel.

“I have very strong opinions…which are subject to change.” -A.J.P. Taylor.

History is made by juveniles—too undeveloped to realize the impact of their folly, and too stubborn to think that they might possibly be in error. While this aphorism by Eric Hofer, the longshoreman-philosopher, is most certainly true for delinquents like George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, it does not explain the vast ignorance and arrogance of self-appointed leaders of public opinion with regard to the Middle East.

As a historian, it is my sad task to point out that, in my opinion, the biggest lie about Iraq has yet to be faced: the falsehood that Iraq is a nation, has ever been a nation, or can ever become one.

This falsehood has not only been sold directly to the American public, along with “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and “Mission Accomplished,” by the aforementioned counterfeit Moses from Texas, but also by a mainstream media that is just as ignorant of the history of Iraq—and Iran—as President Bush is, and just as stubborn about not admitting it.

As is now known, President Bush and the CEO from short-term profit, corporate Empire he reports to, Vice-President Dick Cheney, have led Americans into the promised land of illusion and disaster in the seven plus years they have pretended to know what they were doing.

What is not acknowledged as far as Iraq is concerned is how much help these executive branch morons have had from a-historical, “fourth-branch” morons in the major print and electronic media.

This isn’t just a problem of FOX News, that throwback to the Cold War, Soviet propaganda style, but of all the biggies, from the New York Times to the Washington Post and from NBC and CBS to CNN. The problem is their inability or unwillingness to put facts into historical context concerning the middle East, and their consequent emphasis on the wrong facts.

The current geographical borders of Iraq were not fixed by common agreement of the Shiites, Sunni, Kurds, and others currently killing each other, and any Americans who happen to be in the way. They were byproducts of a deal, cut in 1916, by two civil servants of the British and French Empires, Sykes and Picot. This fact, known to fans of Peter O’Toole’s 1962 performance in “Lawrence of Arabia,” is not widely disseminated, to put it mildly. It can be found on the Internet, but a person would need to imagine context concerning the creation of Iraq out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

Iran, or Persia, on the other hand, has always been a nation [or Empire], since the time of Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C. With their own language, Farsi, which preceded invasions by Greeks (331B.C.),Arabs (642A.D.), Turks (1055),Mongols (1231), Russians and British (1907), British,Russians and Americans (1942), Iranians have a national pride that is long in development, whether wielded by current Bible-thumping (excuse me, Quran-thumping) leadership, or the genuinely democratic leadership of Mohammad Mossadegh, overthrown by the CIA in 1953. Back then they were labeled Communists by the Eisenhower Administration, which they were not.

Today, Iranians are simply labeled as terrorists by the Bushites, when, in fact, these Shiites think the same about Americans, remembering that it was the U.S., among others, which supported Saddam Hussein’s war against them in the 1980’s, before he fell out of favor with his invasion of Kuwait.

Mossadegh and his parliamentary [Majlis] followers had a quaint idea that resources of their country [oil] should be of benefit first and foremost for Iranians, not simply foreign exploiters of that resource, based in Europe and the U.S.

In 1919, the legislature of North Dakota had followed the same reasoning that the resourses of their State [grain] should be of benefit first and foremost for North Dakotans and their families, not simply for foreign exploiters of those resources, based in Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York. The difference was that North Dakota, unlike Iran, had two Senators and two Congressmen, and a Federal Judge in Fargo, Charles Amidon, whose decision that, in effect “socialism” was constitutional, was upheld by a 9-0 decison by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1920.

Media ignorance of the history of lands across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, or for that matter, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, is not a new problem. In his portrait of Vietnam’s Ho-Chih-Minh in the 1950’s, Bernard Fall complained that Time Magazine was more concerned about the brand of cigarette Ho smoked, than the fact that his speech of 1946 in defiance of the French Empire, quoted from the American Declaration of Independence rather than from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.

Likewise, Walter Cronkite, a journalist who really did understand historical context, once complained that up-and-coming TV journalists did not bother with history courses, but were simply more concerned with how their hair looked on camera, and with the cut of their trenchcoat on location.

If any would-be newspapermen, radio, or TV commentators have taken History courses, it is plain from their current ignorance of world affairs that they only bothered with subjects from American History—post-Pearl-Harbor World War II, the Civil War, the American Revolution or Lewis and Clark.

One of the finest beat reporters in Chicago for the Sun Times, once admitted to me that he didn’t know the difference between North and South Dakota—and that he didn’t care. No matter, that, since his editor didn’t require that he know anything beyond Illinois, and he had that down cold. But the national and foreign desks for that paper should know the difference between North and South Dakota, as well as between Iraq and Iran, and they don’t.

As the men from Haliburton and other evil oil Empires, who brought us the war in Iraq, begin to pour into North Dakota with their greedy eyes and mitts fixed upon the Bakken Oil Reserve, we had better pay heed more carefully to the reasons why Senator Kent Conrad, in his principled vote against our 2003 invasion of Iraq, considered it to be a mistaken policy.

Go ahead. Write or call him about it. His response will make more sense than anything you are likely to get from your unelected representatives in the corporate media.