At a time when increasing numbers of Democrats are cozying up to George W. Bush in public, THIS is what needed to be said face-to-face to GWB. Thank, you, Iraq War veteran, Mike Prysner. The best 36 seconds of video I’ve seen in a long time.
[Added Sept 24]
Mike Prysner explains why he confronted George W. Bush. An instructive conversation. Essentially, sociopathic war criminals should not be normalized. They have no remorse and Bush and his friends can’t wait to lie us into the next war to profit their rich defense -industry friends.
It certainly encapsulates the common narrative about Bush lying to justify a second war with Iraq. I think back to a television interview on ABC with the FBI Agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein; it appears to have been broadcast once, then lost in cyberworld. The documentary evidence, according to the broadcast, is located at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The information certainly tracks with what I know about strategic perception management, which is more than most, but isn’t nearly as neat as a sound bite “Bush lied, men died.”
According to the interview, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein calculated that Iran was certain to invade unless it believed that Iraq possessed WMD. Several critical points about strategic perception management are not widely understood. First, active measures to convince others are difficult, expensive and complicated. Second, it is not enough to convince the immediate target of the perception management, or deception operation, one must convince everyone. Either everyone believes, or the house of cards fails. Third, it ultimately doesn’t matter what anyone believes, it only matters what they do as a result of that belief. So, it is necessary throughout perception management to monitor what others are doing, likely to do, or inclined to do, as a result of the belief you’ve spread. There have been very few successful strategic perception management undertakings in history. The most successful was the Twenty Committee, name derived from XX (Double-Cross). During World War II, every Axis espionage agent in Britain was identified and turned, their reporting controlled by British Intelligence. The second-most successful was the WMD perception management operation run by Iraq.
They literally fooled everyone. It’s comforting, and politically convenient, to believe after-the-fact that there was a political opponent who was fundamentally evil and created horror out of malice. But we know that Iran bought the lie, as did Israel, Britain, Japan, Canada, Germany, Egypt – the list is long. There were only two powers that didn’t wholly buy in, France and Russia. Highly-paid agents of Iraqi influence in both countries assured Saddam that they could manage the foolish, unsophisticated Bush, and he would never be a threat. Oops. As a result of the invasion of Iraq re WMD, it wasn’t all down-side. Muamar Qaddafi confessed to his own secret nuclear weapons development program, not wanting to follow Saddam into the grave.
Bush was inclined to believe the lie, of course, a phenomenon we see today reflected in reports of “mostly peaceful” looting, arson and murder, systemic racism and mass murder of unarmed black men by white supremacist police officers, “successful” surrender of Americans and Special Immigrant Visa holders in Afghanistan, a “closed” border, and refusal to follow data about vaccines and viruses when it’s politically convenient. CRT, myths about transgenderism and all sorts of other nonsense. Confirmation bias is one of the strongest forces of nature.
I am not a G.W. Bush fan. I voted for his re-election because Kerry was a chimera, a worm-weasel. If I recall correctly, I voted for Gore in 2000, and almost immediately regretted it. Prior to the election Gore said he hoped we would follow the Constitution regarding the election because he expected to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote. When the result turned out to be the opposite, he changed his mind about the constitution. Imagine that.