Reminder: American Officials Lie About War – Reason.com- Matt Welch:
January 3, 2020 - "'Don't trust liars—especially about matters of war and peace,' writes Vox's Matthew Yglesias. 'Today's a day," The Atlantic's David Frum posits, 'when the most untruthful administration in US history will wish its statements could be believed.' It is appropriate, necessary, yet insufficient to remember that government lying is bad, that government lying about war is particularly bad, and that Donald Trump is one of the most bizarrely promiscuous liars ever seen in American political life....
"The truth, which literally hurts, is that every administration lies about war.... It was literally only last month that The Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" project detailed how ... 'Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible'....
"Frum wrote President George W. Bush's infamous 'Axis of Evil' State of the Union Address in January 2002, linking Iran, North Korea, and especially Iraq .... 'I was to provide a justification for war,' Frum recalled in his memoir. The justification was ... damaging in a way that relates directly to this week's escalation with Iran.... Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive....
"'We knew,' Barack Obama said on March 28, 2011, 'that … if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world..... I refused to let that happen'.... 'This policy,' concluded a detailed and damning post-facto report by the British House of Commons, "was not informed by accurate intelligence'.... Western intelligence agencies, the report found, 'could not verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the Gaddafi regime [and] selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value....[S]trategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.'
"American administrations going to war routinely exaggerate threats, Hitlerize enemies, euphemize foreign casualties, and bend tales of U.S. heroism beyond all human recognition.... The world has never seen an arsenal as powerful as ours, and Lord Acton had a point about that power stuff....
[T]he fog of war, the temptations of power, the quickening heartbeat of fight-or-flight patriotism ... should be, advertisements for human fallibility.... And it should make us more reluctant to give the commanders more authority. Instead, too many people turn off their brains once the battle bugle calls....
"So no, don't trust Donald Trump. Or Mike Pompeo. Or Mitch McConnell. And for God's sake please don't trust David Frum or Matthew Yglesias or Matt Welch either. America will continue being a bull in a china shop for as long as the body politic has more heft than humility. Those audacious enough to wield that awesome power, or to influence the wielding of it, will only begin to earn respect when they acknowledge the mountain of their own lies."
Read more: https://reason.com/2020/01/03/reminder-american-officials-lie-about-war/
'via Blog this'
January 3, 2020 - "'Don't trust liars—especially about matters of war and peace,' writes Vox's Matthew Yglesias. 'Today's a day," The Atlantic's David Frum posits, 'when the most untruthful administration in US history will wish its statements could be believed.' It is appropriate, necessary, yet insufficient to remember that government lying is bad, that government lying about war is particularly bad, and that Donald Trump is one of the most bizarrely promiscuous liars ever seen in American political life....
"The truth, which literally hurts, is that every administration lies about war.... It was literally only last month that The Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" project detailed how ... 'Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible'....
"Frum wrote President George W. Bush's infamous 'Axis of Evil' State of the Union Address in January 2002, linking Iran, North Korea, and especially Iraq .... 'I was to provide a justification for war,' Frum recalled in his memoir. The justification was ... damaging in a way that relates directly to this week's escalation with Iran.... Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive....
"'We knew,' Barack Obama said on March 28, 2011, 'that … if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world..... I refused to let that happen'.... 'This policy,' concluded a detailed and damning post-facto report by the British House of Commons, "was not informed by accurate intelligence'.... Western intelligence agencies, the report found, 'could not verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the Gaddafi regime [and] selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value....[S]trategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.'
"American administrations going to war routinely exaggerate threats, Hitlerize enemies, euphemize foreign casualties, and bend tales of U.S. heroism beyond all human recognition.... The world has never seen an arsenal as powerful as ours, and Lord Acton had a point about that power stuff....
[T]he fog of war, the temptations of power, the quickening heartbeat of fight-or-flight patriotism ... should be, advertisements for human fallibility.... And it should make us more reluctant to give the commanders more authority. Instead, too many people turn off their brains once the battle bugle calls....
"So no, don't trust Donald Trump. Or Mike Pompeo. Or Mitch McConnell. And for God's sake please don't trust David Frum or Matthew Yglesias or Matt Welch either. America will continue being a bull in a china shop for as long as the body politic has more heft than humility. Those audacious enough to wield that awesome power, or to influence the wielding of it, will only begin to earn respect when they acknowledge the mountain of their own lies."
'via Blog this'
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