Soon after the official end of hostilities in Iraq a year ago, I remember George Bush declaring with a completely straight face that the occupation forces were providing electricity, water and food to the Iraqi, things, Bush told us, Saddam was unable to provide. My jaw didn’t so much drop as fall off my face. As reasonable statements of fact go this was on a par with hearing him say that hamburgers grow on trees and are harvested by fairies and then seeing the US population nod their heads in serene agreement as if they were all familiar with the sight of fairies plucking quarter pounders from the boughs of trees.
The truth is that the Iraqi people under Saddam had electricity and water and food. The invasion took all that away.
In fact, international aid agencies told us that Saddam’s oil-for-food distribution system was the most efficient they had ever seen. No one went without.
Then the bombs put an end to all that.
Remembering this, I was pleased to see an article in a recent edition of the Guardian by Johnathon Freedland collecting together lots more examples of these fantastic assertions from our glorious leaders, champions of truth and democracy and … bollocks.
Freedland calls these unsupportable statements ‘doublethink’. I call them big, blatant, stinking lies. Read the article for yourself.
Is it only me that wonders how it is that these pathological liars and cheats are not behind bars, and that they are still in charge of whole nations.
May 15, 2004