How Do I Know He’s Lying? His Lips Are Moving.

How did I miss this?

George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein’s regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memorandum of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though they were privately convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

Mamamia! The Bush apologists get all feisty whenever someone makes an apt comparison between their favourite monkey boy and that finest archetype of totalitarian evil, Adolph Hitler. But this incident is just one more nasty parallel. Few people today know that Nazis sold their invasion of Poland to the German citizens as defence against expected Polish aggression. In fact, the Nazis had created “Operation Himmler,” which was a propagandist campaign to create such an illusion. The centrepiece of Operation Himmler was the co-called “Gleiwitz Incident,” in which a fake attack against a German installation was falsely attributed to the Poles in order to stir up manufactured rage against Poland.

Unknown to most American citizens, the USA has a history of criminally manufacturing rationales for going to war. Most famous is the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was the official reason for American military action in Vietnam, but which was very probably mostly fiction. Long before that, hawks already determined to go to war used the sinking of the USS Maine as a pretext to start the Spanish-American War, despite there being no convincing evidence that the Maine had been sunk by enemy forces. (This episode actually started the trend –and name– of “yellow journalism”.)

So maybe Bush is just following in the steps of American leaders of the past. Doesn’t mean that we –and especially American citizens– have to put up with it. Impeach the bastard already.