In the endless parade of Fox News neocons, Ari Fleisher, the press secretary who helped George W. Bush gaslight the American people into the Iraq War, explained recently that while Donald Trump appears to have desisted from fresh attacks on Iran, he’s merely buying time, “waiting to get the correct military options in place.”
Stating the obvious was only a prelude to war fomenting. Fomenting is always next. Fleischer offers up the latest regime-change rationale, today’s equivalent of the old Iraqi WMD lies: “Iran is responsible for killing more Americans than any other nation that is in place today.”
That’s it? They do struggle to come up with a pretext to market their wars. So now it is this: The global American military empire, having gone halfway around the world a generation ago to start a war on false pretenses, steeping itself in a bloody 1,400-year religious schism that the American people know little about and care about even less, has now become the pretext for the next war of choice.
So no one will be surprised by America’s sad trajectory, I have gathered the evidence of our warlords’ and war liars’ confusion and even the psychological debilitation that guides our nation. But be warned. My new book Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole reveals our state actors to be like episodes of Jaywalking, in which high school girls struggle to answer where the sun goes at night.
For more than two years the lapdog press let Fleischer’s boss, Bush 43, cover his confusion with clownish swagger. My readers will learn that in a meeting with Iraqi expatriates just two months before unleashing his bloody Iraq deluge, the president revealed his profound bewilderment about the forces he would soon let loose. Said the hapless W:
“What? Sunnis? Shiites? I thought Iraqis were all Muslims.”
Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps seeking to top his boss in a contest they could laugh about later, Fleischer offered up this gem:
“I think the burden is on those people who think [Saddam] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”
Like all the threat balderdash Fleischer cooked up from the White House for the American people on a daily basis, he is still at it today. But what exactly does Fleischer’s neocon talking point with its peculiar phrasing “Iran is responsible for killing more Americans than any other nation that is in place today,” actually mean?
The Pentagon cites 603 U.S. combat deaths from Iranian-backed militias during the eight years of the Iraq war. The United States killed almost half that many innocents on just one sunny July morning when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian international passenger flight over the Persian Gulf in 1988. And to make the revulsion of all decent people complete, it must not be allowed to disappear down the memory hole that Bush the Elder, not only defended the slaughter of those non-combatants, but rewarded the captain of the Vincennes with of the Legion of Merit medal.
The number of U.S. casualties in his son’s war that were Iran- or Shia-related is a small percentage of the total American deaths in the Iraq War. Far and away the preponderance of American deaths were at the hands of Sunni affiliates, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, and others.
But Fleischer’s outrage only sounds like it is based on the numerical evidence of who killed the most Americans during their last major neocon adventure. If it really boiled down to metrics, someone might look at the hundreds of thousands Iranian deaths that followed the Iraq invasion of Iran in 1980. American support for Saddam Hussein was far more overt than any Iranian support for Iraq’s Shia factions in the later U.S. invasion. It extended to Washinton’s financial and intelligence support, tactical planning, training, helicopters, trucks, satellite imagery, billions in loan guarantees, as well as barely concealed assistance for the shipment of biological agents like anthrax, and support for illegal Iraqi chemical warfare.
If Fleischer wants to be outraged about American casualties in the elective Iraq war, he might look to the way President Donald Trump has sanitized Ahmed al Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), the Sunni head-chopper that the empire has now installed to run Syria.
It is astonishing that people whose observations fail as grandiosely as Fleischer’s have any platform at all, much less are paid for their commentary. But Fleischer and the neocons on parade at Fox are not just wrong about things haphazardly. They are not wrong at random. They are wrong tendentiously.
It always has to do with the empire of lies fighting other countries’ wars. And it looks like here we go again.
