Photo: U.S. National Archives / Source: Flickr
Fifteen years ago, on February 15, 2003, the world said “No to War”: Some 10 million to 15 million people, in hundreds of cities and dozens of countries all over the world, embraced the same slogan, made the same demand, in scores of different languages. A war against Iraq was looming, with Washington and London standing virtually alone in their false claims that Baghdad had amassed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
As we look at the consequences of that war today—Iraq still in flames, wars raging across the region—we need to remember.
Throughout 2002 and into 2003, while George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” raged across Afghanistan, Washington continued to build support for a war against Iraq. We need to remember how the mainstream media obediently fell—or eagerly jumped—into line with the propaganda churned out by the Dick Cheney–Donald Rumsfeld policy shops. The most influential papers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, led the way, helping to legitimize the spurious predictions of Iraqis welcoming US troops with sweets and flowers, of yellowcake uranium from Niger, of aluminum tubes that could “only” be used for nuclear weapons. Some among the liberal and independent media collaborated as well. Even Patrick Tyler of the Times (who coined the term “second superpower” to describe the February 15 mobilization) acknowledged years later the “grand deception in which we all share in the responsibility…. The military-industrial complex has its analogue in the press, the media-industrial complex.”
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