Gleaming Jewels of Stupidity

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One of the things I like about writing books is the chance to read other peoples' reactions after they're written. After John Stauber and I wrote our latest book, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq, we posted an accompanying video on YouTube. The video has now been viewed more than 200,000 times, and people of various ideological persuasions have added their comments.

In the last few days, the video page has seen a running debate between other YouTubians and a supporter of the war who identifies himself as a 35-year-old U.S. Army Captain. I find the debate interesting as an illustration of how desperately the war's supporters continue to recycle obvious falsehoods and long-discredited lies from the Bush administration.

Sometimes the enthusiasm with which "usarmycaptainamerica" rewrites history is simply laughable, as when he insists that "Democrats, with the exception of and handful [sic] (maybe 5) voted to go to war in Iraq. Get your facts straight and your head screwed on right. ... If you refuse to believe that, and refuse to look at the facts, than I cant help you, you will remain a gleaming jewel of stupidity."

Actually, 133 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against the resolution in 2002 authorizing Bush to go to war, as did 21 Democrats in the Senate. The number of Democrats voting for the resolution was 126 in the House, 21 in the Senate. Republicans were virtually unanimous in supporting the war, but the Democratic vote was an almost perfect 50-50 split.

It is more interesting still to examine CaptainAmerica's equally erroneous reference to supposedly new information which he views as confirmation that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. "It came out maybe 2 months ago that Saddam was 12 months out from developing a nuke," he writes. When challenged on this point, he advises that people should "google sadam [sic] 12 months from getting nukes." I followed his suggestion, and therein lies a tale.

My Google search led me to a conservative blog called PoliPundit, where an item dated November 3 declares, "Saddam Closer to Bomb than Anyone Thought." The source for this claim turns out to be a New York Times story published that same day, which discussed the U.S. government's decision to shut down a web site where (in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress), it had published hundreds of pages of Iraqi documents — including information on how to build a nuclear weapon, taken from Iraq's nuclear program that was abandoned following its 1991 defeat in Operation Desert Storm.

It's true that in the years immediately following Desert Storm, U.S. officials were shocked to find that Iraq's nuclear program was further along than they had previously believed. However, those events — and the sanctions and inspections that forced Iraq to abandon its quest for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons — occurred a decade prior to 2002, when Bush and his supporters led America to war by invoking the spector of an imminent threat. So how does PoliPundit manage to conclude that Saddam was still on the verge of building an A-bomb in 2002? Simple: He practices what the philosopher Nietzche calls "the art of reading badly." In the middle of the New York Times article, he finds the following paragraph:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

A careful reading of the above paragraph (and of the Times story in its entirety) makes it clear that its mention of the year 2002 refers to reports that were written then for the United Nations. The second sentence above simply states that Saddam's scientists were working on an atom bomb "at the time" of the first Gulf war — a fact that no one disputes but that hardly constituted an imminent threat in 2002.

PoliPundit, however, reads the Times paragraph as "a VERY IMPORTANT item that the blogosphere needs to work together on. ... The New York Times is confirming that in 2002, Iraq was one year away from building an atomic bomb." And how does the right-wing blogosphere "work together" on this? It simply repeats this canard, over and over again. PoliPundit's blog posting alone lists a dozen or so right-wing websites that have taken up the cry, including William F. Buckley's National Review, which declares, "The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it."

Using the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, I searched for examples of other blog postings that link to the PoliPundit entry and found dozens, with headlines such as "Bush told truth! Saddam a threat!" "Thanks for Confirming, NY Times," or "How do you want that crow served, liberals?"

The whole brouhaha reminds me of those old Emily Litella skits that Gilda Radner used to do on "Saturday Night Live" where she played a sweet, hard-of-hearing lady who would deliver a misguided rant about "presidential erections" instead of "presidential elections" or "sax and violins" instead of "sex and violence" on television. When someone pointed out her mistake at the end of the skit, she would smile sweetly and apologize by saying, "Never mind."

The difference, though, is that I have not been able to find an instance in which any of the right-wing bloggers and pundits who disseminated this particular piece of nonsense has ever admitted their mistake. The pro-war echo chamber has less integrity than Emily Litella, and her malapropisms never cost anyone their life. Her skits made me laugh, but it is tragic rather than funny to see people like CaptainAmerica believing and in fact clinging desperately to third-generation Xerox versions of the original lies that sent them out to kill and be killed.