10/01/05 "Another Day in the Empire" -- -- As Hitler knew, “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” and as the inventors of the Big Lie, the British Office of Strategic Services, realized, “if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” Both of these propagandistic techniques are currently at work in Iraq. For instance, consider the following, reported by the Associated Press: a U.S. military offense in western Iraq, called Operation Iron Fist, is “aimed to root out al-Qaida militants who have taken hold of the village [Sadah, characterized as a “known terrorist sanctuary” by ABC News] and use it as a base for attacks on Iraqi civilians and security forces.” Operation Iron Fist is “also aimed to stop foreign fighters from entering the country from Syria and improving security in the region before Iraq’s Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution, the military said. Sunni insurgents have vowed to derail the referendum and have launched a surge of violence that has killed at least 200 people—including 13 U.S. service members—in the past six days.”

In short, the occupation of Iraq is at least partially about “al-Qaeda” and its supposed ability to enter Iraq from Syria, a country deemed to be part of an “axis of evil” (people who hate Americans and want to kill them), and because they hate us and our “way of life” (which presumably includes democratic government), “al-Qaeda” and their Syrian backers and protectors are attempting to “derail the referendum” in Iraq through terrorism, that is to say slaughtering innocent civilians, especially Shi’ite civilians.

Hitler said the Big Lie must contain “a certain force of credibility.” However, the Big Lie at the heart of the invasion and occupation of Iraq (which has mutated at least three times) is not credible, i.e., the U.S. is engaged in a “war” against a tenacious terrorism and the focus of that struggle (promised to last a hundred years or more) is in Iraq—or more accurately, the border region between Iraq and Syria. For many, this fairy tale is credible, even though the real reason for such operations—spreading violence and fear on the border of the next target “rogue nation” in the “war on terrorism”—is transparently and absurdly obvious.

“‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush aide announced some time ago. In Bushzarro world, reality is Platonic, that is to say it is speculative and theoretical, and facts “on the ground” are meaningless. As the corporate media reports on occasion, citing Pentagon sources, there are few “foreign fighters” and virtually no “al-Qaeda militants” in Iraq. Bush’s “war on terrorism” is essentially a series of slogans—for instance, al-Qaeda hates “our freedoms… our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech” and the “terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children,” etc.—and tangible facts (the Iraqi resistance is a national liberation movement determined to expel Anglo-American occupation forces) are not allowed to penetrate this shroud of vacuous slogans and neocon shibboleths.

In a conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler declared there “is only so much room in a brain, so much wall space, as it were, and if you furnish it with your slogans, the opposition has no place to put up any pictures later on, because the apartment of the brain is already crowded with your furniture.” In the same way, Bush—or rather Bush’s neocon handlers and strategists (Bush is little more than a front man, a cardboard cut-out without a philosophy of his own)—has done a masterful job of crowding out objective reality in regard to Iraq and “al-Qaeda” and has replaced the intellectual furniture of many if not most Americans with a PNAC (Project for the New American Century) living room set.

Even back in August of 2003, a few months after Bush’s invasion—when we were told the invasion was all about weapons of mass destruction—the neocons employed the “al-Qaeda” ruse and linked it to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia (the latter since characterized as the epicenter of Islamic evil and thus unofficially listed on the “axis of evil” roster). “The [Iraq-Syria] borders are quite porous, as you’d imagine, and the fact that we’ve captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia,” declared the neocon Richard Armitage, then Deputy Secretary of State. “Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue, has written of the need to shift Al Qaeda’s confrontation with the US from relatively peripheral places like Afghanistan to the Middle East,” added the Christian Science Monitor.

Thus an indigenous Iraqi resistance is owned by the Jordanian “militant” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Azzam, “a major figure” in “al-Qaeda,” according to Anthony Cordesman, a former senior intelligence analyst for the US and now an “expert” on the Iraq insurgency at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a neocon “officials-in-waiting” think tank. Azzam, who is said to be dead (and then not dead), is the “No. 2 Al Qaeda operative in Iraq, next to Zarqawi,” as Gen. Richard Myers, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it the other day. Azzam is also characterized as the emir of “al-Qaeda” operations in Baghdad.

As Hitler knew, a ceaseless stream of lies and half-truths, as disseminated by official propaganda outlets (in Nazi Germany, the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; in the United States, the corporate media feeding off Pentagon backgrounders), endeavor to rearrange the intellectual furniture of Americans, who now believe “al-Qaeda” is in Iraq, although they are apparently less convinced Bush’s occupation and offensive operations in Iraq (such as Operation Iron Fist or the Orwellian sounding Operation Restore Rights in Tal Afar) will defeat this illusory terrorist threat.

Of course, the United States is not fighting against “al-Qaeda in Iraq” but rather the Iraqi resistance and the “operations” (invasions) of villages near the Syrian border are designed to remind us that Bush’s “war” is a noble cause determined to defeat international terrorism before it reaches our shores. In fact, Bush and crew have long claimed Iran and Syria “harbor and assist terrorists,” including “Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” as CNN reported soon after Bush’s invasion (al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad—this potpourri of disparate “terror” organizations share the same objectives, according to the neocons, and thus pose a monolithic threat, as absurd as this idea is to people who actually use their cerebral cortex).

“Even before the U.S. occupation forces settled into Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Baghdad, the neoconservatives who have set the direction of the Bush presidency’s radical foreign and military policies were looking toward Syria,” writes Tom Barry. “The road to Damascus, which is at the center of the Bush administration’s roadmap for restructuring the Middle East, doesn’t run directly from Baghdad. Its starting points are in Washington, Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, and Beirut—charted by the neoconservative think-tanks, the Christian Right, and the right-wing Zionists who move easily back and forth between Capitol Hill and the Middle East.”

Now that the Bushcons have followed Hitler’s advice to the letter—using prefabricated Big Lies to rearrange the intellectual furniture of average, often intellectually lazy Americans—the push is on to demonize Syria as the source of evil, including suicide bombings in Iraq (pay no attention to those SAS men lurking about) and the presence of “al-Qaeda” bad guys who so easily slip across the border, apparently with Bashar Assad’s blessing.

In short, Operation Iron Fist is all about destabilizing the border and setting up the pretext to conduct bombing raids against Damascus, “the center of the Bush administration’s roadmap for restructuring the Middle East.”