Dr. Forbush Thinks

People apparently will believe whatever they want regardless of the facts. This is certainly the case with the War in Iraq. People in favor of the war would rather create complex justification for their personal beliefs before they will admit that their initial belief was wrong.

Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne did this yesterday on the Diane Rehm Show. She told us that her husband never said that there was a tie between Iraq and 9/11/2001. There are at least three high profile times where Dick Cheney said that there were Iraqi ties to al Qaeda. Is this just another effort of the administration to spread misinformation? As Think Progress points out on its blog there are at least three times that Dick Cheney said that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. On Meet the Press in particular on November 14, 2003 Tim Russert told Dick Cheney that 69% of the American people believed that there were ties between Iraq and 9/11. At this point it is clear that we now know that Cheney knew that there wasn’t any connection between Iraq and 9/11/2001. But Cheney refused to clear up this misconception. He would rather allow the lies to continue to propagate through the media. Now, Lynne is spreading rumors that Dick Cheney never made the connection. But, the real question is, do 69% of Americans still believe that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11/2001?

Fox News has a new poll out where they tell us that 19% of Americans believe that Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction. How could one fifth of Americans think this? They point out that this opinion hasn’t really changed since the beginning of this War. Does this mean that people don’t read the papers? But, another question is if Iraq had WMD, wouldn’t they have used it when they were being attacked? I would think that having the weapons would have been pointless if they weren’t going to use them. The lack of use alone should prove that they couldn’t be used if they existed, or they didn’t exist at all. Saddam wasn’t afraid to use them as the right tends to point out every time the Iraq War is a subject. What keeps people believing this even though we know that it is not true? Surely some people who believed this at the beginning of the War should have shied away from this idea with lack of discovery. Then again Fox News did the poll, there could be incompetence on either side of the telephone.

So, I guess that it is obvious that people who believe that we are winning the war will continue to believe this no matter what happens in Iraq. As I wrote,the rate of soldiers being killed by insurgents has gone from 1.6 soldiers per day in May 2003 when President Bush declared mission accomplished. Eighteen months later the rate of soldiers being killed in Iraq has increased steadily to 2.9 soldiers per day. Is this evidence of progress? But people who can’t do math will continue to believe the lies that the administration feeds them.

And, now we are learning that the administration’s effort to spread misinformation worked so well in the United States that they are now doing the same thing in Iraq. This causes me to ask the question, what is Democracy? Most people believe that Democracy is based on the idea every citizen has a vote and the population can determine the direction of the country. But, if the citizens don’t have the truth they can not make an honest choice. If the truth is hidden and citizens don’t know the truth they can not vote based on real facts. But, the Republicans don't want what is good for our country, they want what is good for the few wealthy Republicans that are pulling the strings. They could never win an election if the American citizens knew and believed the truth, but lies just keep propagating. And the Bush administration wants to do the same thing in Iraq. We need to pray that the Iraqis are smart enough to NOT believe the propaganda.









Politics, Iraq, Iraq War, Impeach Bush