The Propaganda of Fear

The Propaganda of Fear:
the neoconservative assault on Truth, Civil Liberties, and the Planet

by Norlyn Dimmit, OpEdNews.com

The “Bush Doctrine”, spelled out in the National Security Strategy, says that we will attack who we want, when we want. That doctrine, from which we get the globally destabilizing “preventive attack”, is something all Americans should be questioning. The Bush Doctrine, like the war on Iraq that exemplifies it, is the product not of September 11, but of years of neoconservative hawkishness, authored by many who never served in our armed forces (Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen and dozens of lesser known fear mongers.) They, nevertheless, don’t mind our troops dying for their megalomaniacal ambitions.

In the aftermath of our short war on Iraq, it is abundantly clear that Iraq did not pose any real threat to our security. But the authors of the war already knew that. Their goal was to manufacture an enemy, and manufacture fear, shamelessly playing off the tragedy of September 11. They have desperately wanted to attack Iraq since the first Gulf War, and through an extensive propaganda campaign, they managed to convince a great many Americans that Iraq was behind September 11, an outright lie.

Terrorism is real, and we should aggressively confront it, but surely not by attacking the one Arab country least likely to associate with fundamentalists like bin Laden (Hussein and bin Laden intensely despised one another). Iraq was an easy target. Hussein was despicable, and Iraq was the weakest of the potential nuclear threats. But now that Pandora’s box is opened wide, and a new policy of preventive attack has been publicly executed, the neoconservatives are aggressively advocating war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon and others. Once again, the goal is to exaggerate danger and to distort facts, in order to put fear in all Americans.

The Iraq war was a product of a mass of lies, disseminated widely. Americans simply would not have supported the war if they were armed with the truth. Lying to the people “for their own good”, as the neoconservatives would put it (and as they actively endorse, in private company), is a horrific subversion of our democracy. The blame lies not only with the neoconservatives (a tiny percentage of Americans who would like to see us in a state of perpetual war) but with the media, which give these neoconservative pundits air time grossly out of proportion to their actual numbers.

The result of these lies is a new “Culture of Fear” which enables Ashcroft to continually erode our civil liberties, and which stifles dissent, even as we alienate the rest of the world and inflame Arab fundamentalists. We have fewer rights, in exchange for less international support and a higher likelihood of terrorism. Renewed terrorism will in turn keep the flames of fear burning brightly, perversely justifying more rights erosion and more violence. This cycle simply must be broken.

Norlyn Dimmitt
Fox Valley Citizens for Peace

Norlyn was a life insurance actuary for 18 years, but after launching www.InsuranceGuide.com, he left the corporate world and launched Connection Realty in St. Charles, IL, with his wife Marcia (see www.NorlynAndMarcia.com). He now spends the majority of his waking hours as an activist for peace, justice and environmental sustainability. "Toward those ends, for the past few years, Norlyn has been researching the concept of deliberative democracy -- in a nutshell, he believes strongly that political dialogue can be both personally and politically transformative."