"Baghdad Bob" Lives; Fictional News for a Fictional War

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers for news." -A.J. Liebling

In early July, a horrific car bombing by Iraqi insurgents in Baghdad killed dozens of people, including several children. A U.S. military press release after the explosion quoted an "unidentified Iraqi" at the scene of the attack, who was fuming. The "unidentified Iraqi" was so mad that he had this to say:

"The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children, and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists."

Amazingly enough, after an insurgent attack two weeks later on newly-trained Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), another "unidentified Iraqi" interviewed at the scene railed against those responsible. The angry man, quoted in another U.S military press release, said this:

"The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF, and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists."

Well, that unidentified Iraqi seems to have quite a habit of finding himself conveniently armed with a stack of unchanging Republican talking points and getting himself quoted amidst the carnage of daily insurgent attacks.

Yesterday, however, after someone noticed the similarity between the ridiculous, over-the-top quotes by our Mesopotamian mystery man, the U.S. military apologized for the lines in its official news releases. Freaked out by the discovery of the outright falsifications and lies that led to the double quoting of a fictional person, and determined not to let it cause further exploration of their daily campaigns of disgusting war propaganda, two different military sources quickly put to the rest the "confusion" that they ascribed to an "administrative error."

While reading about this, I suddenly found myself drifting back to good ol' 2003, the year when the multilateralist-friendly Bush administration declared it was going to war simply to enforce U.N. resolutions about WMD. Although the rhetoric and talking points justifying the war have shifted a good five or six times since then, the same standards for fictional news stories were around.

Remember the outrage back in 2003 when the New York Times' Jayson Blair was caught making things up to fill his articles? Remember how it led to a national investigation of journalistic truth and ethics that exposed several other writers for having made up stories? Remember the soul-searching at the Times it caused? Remember the weeks of heavy media coverage it provoked?

Remember the hilarity back in 2003 when Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf made up stories about how the war was going? (Sahaf was dubbed "Baghdad Bob" by dumb Americans who couldn't pronounce a name they hadn't seen on soap operas or in NASCAR races). Remember how we all laughed when he declared that "there are no American infidels in Baghdad" even as the city fell to U.S. troops? Remember the endless jokes on cable news networks and late-night shows about the silly Iraqis who pretended to be winning a war that they were clearly losing?

Well, it's a good thing that it's 2005 now and no one makes up silly stories anymore, especially not about things like losing a war in Iraq. Or maybe that's just what I've been led to believe because of the lack of media coverage given to this blatant example of U.S. propaganda.

The U.S. military and government can, and will, keep lying about the status of the war in Iraq to the bitter end. Let's not forget that the government tried to declare victory even as it was pulling out of Vietnam.

The truth deficit between the Bush administration and average Americans will continue to widen as the government gets more desperate in the face of an insurgency that continues to grow. No amount of lies, however, can cover the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and 1,700 U.S. troops. In the end, the truth about a war that has recruited al-Qaida's next generation of suicide bombers will emerge, but the human lives lost and human rights abuses committed will remain as George W. Bush's legacy.