Press Manipulation and the Iraq War: US Was Not ‘Duped’ By British Disinformation — It Duped Itself

In light of stories spilling the beans on a British campaign of lying to foreign (mostly third-world) media about the dangerousness of Iraq, Zbig is putting out the meme that the US got duped into the Iraq war by British disinformation. This is not credible, as can be seen from every “insider's” account (e.g. Seymore Hersh's article in the New Yorker last October).

In the Bad Old Days, around the Vietnam War era, the CIA had an ongoing program of putting US reporters on retainer. That got stopped. And it had another program of dropping disinformation into foreign newspapers, often third world. Some of the disinfo may have been for legitimate intelligence purposes (to confuse the Bad Guys), but a fair amount of it was designed in the hopes that the disinfo would find its way back to the US and be picked up by our newspapers. The goal was nothing less than to subtly manipulate the US electorate. That was supposed to have stopped too.

Perhaps now we do it by proxy. This past weekend the world press reported on a campaign by the British CIA-equivalent, MI6, in which it 'misled' media on Iraq.

But wait! The right wing is already spinning the story! Here comes Zbigniew Brzezinski calling for an investigation into how the US was manipulated into the Iraq war. See, it wasn't our fault! Those perfidious British with their media manipulation and unverified intel about irrelevant non-existent yellowcake purchases! They are responsible, not that nice George W. Bush!

I personally find the idea that the US administration—which by all reputable accounts was lusting for this war since at least 9/11 if not since it took office (or in some cases, since the cease-fire in Gulf War One)—could possibly be manipulated into Gulf War Two to be laughable. Will anyone buy into Zbig's weird spin? Probably.

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