Believing our own propaganda?
NPR’s Fresh Air did an interesting interview last week with Newsweek’s Middle Eastern Regional Editor Christopher Dickey in which he pointed out, among other things:
I think the important thing for people in the United States to understand is that this war has almost no credibility as far as the rest of the world is concerned, certainly not in the Arab world.
I’ve been talking to a lot [of Iraqi refugees]…. There has been no refugee flow out of Iraq whatsoever. All the flow has been back into Iraq by people who want to go be with their families, help defend their homes, and in some cases, many say they want to help defend Saddam Hussein.
You have to remember that a couple of weeks ago nobody would have given a plugged nickel for Saddam Hussein. People didn’t support him, they didn’t like him, they saw the horrors that he represented. They didn’t particularly like the idea of this war, in fact many, many were opposed to it, but they didn’t like him. Now, he emerges as a kind of a hero, standing up to the United States, holding fast against the American onslaught…. This is the superpower, the greatest power on earth, bringing an enormous amount of force to bear on a country of 24 million people, that has been under boycott and embargo for the last 12 years, and has had its army decimated in several wars. So to see the Iraqis standing up at this point [weeks into the war], to see Saddam standing up, is a source of inspiration and pride, and also growing anger, in the Arab and Muslim world. It is not really not improving the image of the United States.
Nobody in this part of the world uses the word “liberation.” President Bush can repeat that again and again as much as he wants, and so can Tony Blair. The fact is, nobody believes it. Everybody here sees this as an invasion and the beginning of an occupation of a sovereign Arab state.