Iraq:Truth be Told by Eva Knapp

In 2002, a senior advisor to President Bush said to journalist Ron Suskind, "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - - judiciously, as you will, - - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out."

The horror that is Iraq today stands as a shameful metaphor for this government’s practice of "creating its own reality". Illegal abuse of power, disregard for international law, flagrant violation of the Constitution, systematic secrecy, deception and lies have brought our country to this moment. It’s well documented that toppling Saddam Hussein was a Bush priority from the beginning, and, after 9/11, the manipulation of our fears became the strategy for selling the war. The Downing Street Memo states, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Contrary to the created reality, Iraq had no WMDs, no connection to 9/11, and presented no threat to our country. Before the invasion, the Iraqi people had suffered thirteen years of brutal sanctions during which time an estimated million people died, half of them children. The people were starving; the country, having been forced to disarm, was being routinely bombed by US/UK air surveillance; Saddam was in a box. That’s the Iraq we invaded.

But, we all remember the conditioning campaign: grim faces conjured up images of mushroom clouds and chorused the "grave and gathering danger" that Saddam posed. Bush reassured us that his job was to "protect the American people" and vowed to take out Saddam, (who gassed his own people) and liberate Iraq. Then came the great media light shows-"Operation Iraqi Freedom" and "Shock and Awe"-war as show business.

Four years later, their false claims have shamed us in the world, and Iraq is a ghastly place of ravaged cities and scorched land - its people maimed and suffering, hundreds of thousands killed. Over 3000 of our soldiers have died, and tens of thousands are permanently wounded in body and mind-and no end in sight. The American people deserve to know the horror that has been unleashed in Iraq-the use of depleted uranium, napalm and cluster bombs, the legitimation of torture, the ecological impact of it all. We are paying for this brutal enterprise. It violates our national soul.

Yet, a new troop surge is under way in Iraq; the Administration is ginning up the same choreographed campaign against Iran, and aircraft carriers are steaming toward the Middle East. The possible outcomes are unthinkable.