The Road Map to Empire
by Michel Chossudovsky and Ian Woods
Editorial, Global Outlook, No. 5, Summer/ Fall 2003
www.globalresearch.ca 18 July 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307C.html
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In the war's sinister aftermath, the entire world knows that the pretext for the invasion of Iraq was based on fabricated evidence and doctored intelligence. (See p.13.) The facts regarding Iraq's alleged WMDs had been carefully manipulated. The lies were known and documented prior to the war, discussed behind closed doors not only at the UN Security Council but also on Capitol Hill.
Prior to the war's onslaught and throughout the military campaign, the US media, in close liaison with the Pentagon, was instrumental in withholding the truth. This tactic is straight out of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence which Bush promised would be shut down due to the public uproar against the idea that the Pentagon might be allowed to spread false information in the media for their own purposes. (For more see Global Outlook No. 4, p.20.)
Covert ‘dirty tricks' operations had been launched to produce misleading intelligence, which was then fed into the news chain. WMD-Al Qaeda threats to ‘the Homeland' had been played up and repeated ad nauseam, pasted on a daily basis across the tabloids. The objective of the disinformation campaign was to "whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor", while fudging the issue of forged intelligence until the war was over. The fact that President Bush was an outright liar was only brought to US public's attention in the invasion's aftermath, once a US-UK occupation government (‘The Authority'), duly sanctioned by the UN, had been put in place.
Releasing the ‘Big Lie'
When the unofficial ‘release date' was reached in early June, the ‘Big Lie' was revealed. Time magazine, which had relentlessly applauded the coalition's invasion plan, started accusing the Bush Administration of "cooking the books". How convenient! Now that Iraq is occupied, looted and pillaged by American and British troops, the lie has now belatedly surfaced on the front pages of America's newspapers.
Leading Democrats in the US Congress were fully aware that the Administration's casus belli was a brazen lie. They had agreed, however, with their Republican cronies, to remain silent on the issue of cooked intelligence until after the Blitzkrieg and the conquest of Iraq. The US Senate and British House of Commons inquiries do not purport to "undo a war" waged on a fabricated pretext, nor demand the eventual withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq. Quite the contrary – more troops have been sent into Iraq to quell armed resistance against occupation forces. (See p.3, Global Outlook, Issue 5.)
As a result, the US has vastly increased its military presence in the broader Middle East Central Asian region. In the immediate wake of the war, even France, Germany and Russia, which had earlier opposed the invasion, granted (in the name of multilateralism) their unbending support to the US-UK led ‘Authority' in Iraq. In so doing, they have not only violated the UN charter, they are also complicit in the crimes committed against the Iraqi people, including the killing of over 3,000 civilians and the maiming of countless others in the latest Gulf War.
Visibly, a token deal had been struck, behind closed doors, between the victors and ‘Old Europe' on sharing a portion of Iraq's sizeable oil wealth.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
The ‘public outcry' on cooked intelligence – carefully orchestrated by the corporate media – creates the illusion of an unbiased press and a functioning democracy. Yet this ritual, in which political leaders are said to be held accountable, also contributes to upholding the democratic fa