'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq' Is Misleading Propaganda

What others have called "overselling", I call propaganda. The Smith-Mundt Act forbids domestic desemination of information (read: propaganda) prepared for foreign audiences.

America historically has been sensitive to the use and misuse of propaganda, especially by its own government. Americans from all walks of life react angrily when they believe that crude propaganda is imposed on them or used to disseminate inaccurate information. MORE

Technically, the Bush Administration can lie to us everyday without any legal accountability solely to the act of deceit. The problem is while the Bush Administration has lied everyday of his Administration, the mainstream media hasn't regularly challenged him. Paul Krugman has increasingly taken up this topic with increasingly shrill tones. DeLong points out that this shrillness is the antithesis of the Krugman he knew. Something has changed him.
NY Times - Paul Krugman

"National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points - "victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest"; "failure is not an option" - repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.


It's an embarrassing piece of work. Yet it's also an important test for the news media. The Bush administration has lost none of its confidence that it can get away with fuzzy math and fuzzy facts - that it won't be called to account for obvious efforts to mislead the public. It's up to journalists to prove that confidence wrong.


[...]There's a lot more like that in the document. Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.


The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.


So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned? MORE