NY Times tomorrow (Sunday) will review Frank Rich's new book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold," in which Rich takes on the Bush admin. and how it created a false reality with which to buffalo the American public re: Iraq, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Buruma.t.html?ref=review"... As a former theater critic, Frank Rich has the perfect credentials for writing an account of the Bush administration, which has done so much to blur the lines between politics and show business...
"...Rich’s subject is the creation of false reality. ... (T)he point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name. ...
"We now know that none of these claims, which together constituted the official reason for unleashing a war, were even remotely true. The later excuses about honest beliefs based on faulty intelligence would have been more convincing if a memo had not surfaced from the British government, quoting the head of British intelligence as saying that the Bush administration had made sure that “the intelligence and facts” about the W.M.D.’s “were being fixed around the policy” of going to war. He said this in July 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. Even without the memo, it has long been clear that some of the United States government’s own analysts had cast severe doubts on the reasons for going to war.
"Yet — and this is where Rich is particularly acute — most serious papers published the White House claims on their front pages, and buried any doubts in small news items at the back. Political weeklies with a liberal pedigree, like The New Republic, fell in line with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, stating that the president would be guilty of “surrender in the war on international terrorism” should he fail to make an effort to topple Saddam Hussein. Bob Woodward, the scourge of the Nixon administration, wrote “Bush at War,” a book that seemed to take everything his White House sources told him at face value."
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