Government specialty: Lying about war

EDITED ILLUSTRATION (ORIGINAL BY MOHAMED HASSAN)

Iran was close to having a nuclear bomb. Or not. Either way, U.S. strikes obliterated those facilities. Or not.

War and military actions of other sorts have always been ripe for exaggeration and blatant lying by U.S. governments, whether it’s in manufacturing a justification for a war or in misrepresenting a war’s degree of success.

The deceit goes beyond the customary spinning and slanting we hear from government leaders and spokespeople during discussions of other topics. That’s because wars are so costly and consequential, in multiple ways, that administrations must convince the public that there exists an urgent necessity beyond a self-interested political motivation. And once engaged, success is always more elusive than it seemed in the Situation Room, but a government isn’t going to tell the public that all those sacrifices are being made for a losing cause.

Lying about war has been happening forever. The role of the press is to reveal the lies, if not immediately then with the benefit of time.

For many current journalists and much of the public, the lesson to distrust the government came from the Vietnam War. The Johnson Administration was allowed to escalate the war because it lied to Congress about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Years of deception about U.S. conduct in Vietnam by multiple administrations got famously exposed by The New York Times with its publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The Washington Post’s remarkable Afghanistan Papers in 2019 showed the U.S. government, despite its public statements, knew of its many mistakes and the unwinnable nature of that war.

The George W. Bush administration made false claims to Congress and the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist group. The start of the Iraq War in 2003 was not a great moment for the press.

Short of full-fledged war, isolated military strikes have caused unintended harm that officials acknowledged belatedly or never.

Figuring out the truth about military actions isn’t easy. Reporters usually can’t witness events because they occur in places that are distant, hostile or dangerous. Leaks are hard to come by.

But cutting through the propaganda is possible. It starts with wanting to. There’s considerable evidence over the years that the national mainstream media – apology for the blanket statement – are pro-war. War certainly brings an audience. But that shouldn’t change the assignment.

Journalists need to use a variety of tools: Contacts in other countries, anonymity for sources, verified social media posts, photo/video forensics, embedding with units, and cautious language. Above all, they need skepticism about what they’re hearing from the podium, especially during the current administration. That means reporting aggressively, ignoring the inevitable slams of insufficient patriotism, and constantly asking the most important question: “What’s your evidence?”