US Recipe For Getting Into Wars: Repeat as Necessary

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Repeat-as-Necessary-by-BK-Faunce-America_Attack_Enemy_Fear-140913-204.html

Americans love their historical amnesia.

US Recipe For Getting Into Wars: Repeat as Necessary
By BK Faunce
OpEdNews Op Eds 9/13/2014 at 12:03:04

Unable to reconcile the myth (the US stands for freedom and democracy) with reality (the US murders large numbers of innocent people in order to steal their resources), they choose to forget. And in forgetting their own history, as Santayana warned, they are condemned to repeat it.

In August 1965, the US gov't told the American people one of their ships had been attacked by the North Vietnamese while on a "routine mission" in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Johnson declared it an act of war. Congress convened and quickly passed the "Tonkin Resolution" - and virtually overnight the conflict in Vietnam escalated into a major war.

Turns out it was all a lie, a covert propaganda campaign carried out by the US gov't to trick its own citizens into supporting a war of aggression waged against a country that posed no threat to the US. The truth is the attack never happened, something even Sec of Defense Robert McNamara has had to admit. But the truth wasn't the point. The point was to get Americans to hate and fear the Vietnamese. And it worked. By the end of 1965 polls showed 61% of the public supported increasing the war effort.



Twenty-five years later, the US gov't told the American people Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was nothing less than a threat to western civilization. Americans were understandably war-weary. But no matter. On 10 October 1990, days before a crucial congressional vote, US officials held a news conference at which they introduced 15 year-old Nayirah. (Her last name was kept secret, reporters were told, to protect her identity.) Miss Nayirah proceeded to tell a horrified national audience that she had witnessed armed Iraqi soldiers storm into Kuwaiti hospitals and throw babies from their incubators.

--

15 year-old Nayirah "was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US".

[merrily]

1. I don't always know what is true and what is propaganda.

Pro-war propaganda, anti Arab propaganda, anti-American propaganda, whatever.

I know for certain that I wish all humans from all nations and groups would evolve to a point at which they have better answers to international issues than killing people.

That's not an original thought but it's all I've got this a.m. Sorry.

[Dems to Win]

2. In the run-up to Papa Bush's First Iraq War, an elderly woman told me it was just like

the lies and theater used to sell America on World War I. This script has been used for a long, long time.

Such a tragedy for humans and the Earth.