Pre-war lies, post-war lies

A recent survey discloses the media campaign that precedeed the US invasion of Iraq. This survey is summarized in this AFP wire «Truth was first US casualty in Iraq war: study»
We read : «US President George W. Bush and his top officials ran roughshod over the truth in the run-up to the Iraq war lying a total of 935 times, a study released Wednesday found.
Bush and his administration “waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” said the damning report entitled “False Pretenses.”
According to the Center for Public Integrity, eight administration officials “made at least 935 false statements” about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, or links to Al-Qaeda, on 532 separate occasions.
“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”»

People can enjoy that such a study has been carried out. An exemple of transparency.

But :
1. The Bush administration still keeps its position, claiming that «what (the administration) said was a consensus that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.»
2. Very few medias were critics at the time of these statements.
3. Very few medias acknowledged their mistakes.
4. A vast majority of the medias still refuse to listen to what the Iraqi regime was saying prior to the invasion.

On Jan. 24th, CBS’ 60 minutes released an exclusive interview with George Piro, a Lebanese-American working for the FBI who interrogated Saddam Hussein for seven months.
The main point of this interview is that Saddam was surprised by the invasion. He «initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen.»

It is a mistake and even a lie to say that Saddam Hussein « kept secret the fact that he had no WMD’s. » On numerous occasions, the Iraqi diplomacy claimed, in press statements or in public speeches (Unmovic, UN Security council, …), that these weapons were destroyed in the 1990’s.

At that time, at least on this issue, the US administration was the only to lie.
Saddam’s regime wasn’t.

«Still wrong in Afghanistan»

The American counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan costs the US tax payers one billion dollars a year. But, according to the former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke (read his column in the Washington Post here - you need to register), it may be «the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy.»

Ineffective ? Not only. This program is even counter-productive.

«It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan», Holbrooke says.
According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. The evidence, for the former diplomat, of the failure of this program.

«The program destroys crops in insecure areas, especially in the south, where the Taliban is strongest. This policy pushes farmers with no other source of livelihood into the arms of the Taliban without reducing the total amount of opium being produced. Meanwhile, there is far too little effort made against the drug lords and high-ranking government officials who are at the heart of the huge drug trade in Afghanistan — probably the largest single-country drug production since 19th-century China (‘liberated’ Afghanistan has virtually been turned to a narco-state, producing 90% of the world’s opium, I precise) — whose dollar value equals about 50 percent of the country’s official gross domestic product. There is a direct correlation between opium production and security », he says.

Despite this, very few allies of the US in Afghanistan dare to give them any piece of advice and France is likely about to announce an increase of its military deployment.