Twenty-one years ago today, the US government launched an illegal war of aggression against Iraq on the basis of the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
I was speaking out against that forthcoming war in 2002 and early 2003. I got called a "conspiracy theorist", "unpatriotic", "anti-American", "pro-Saddam", etc., for telling the truth that the government was lying to start a war for purely geostrategic purposes.
It wasn't hindsight. I saw right through the B.S.
That's actually how I got started doing independent journalism. I realized I had a skill at taking a lot of contradictory information and doing research analysis to determine the truth.
So, I just started doing that in my spare time because I saw how the terrifyingly the mainstream media was failing to do their job (or "refusing" might be a better word since it seems so deliberate sometimes); and I just felt that it was important for me to do what I could to help people learn the truth.
And, now, that is my full-time job! How you like that? 😊
Anyhow, back then, I was fairly well traumatized by my rude awakening. I learned the hard way that no matter how many facts I provided to others to support my conclusions, no matter how reasonable my argument, people just refused to accept what I was saying.
I realized then one of the most important lessons of my lifetime.
Are you ready for it? 🤔
Here it is: Lots of people just believe what they want to believe.
In this particular case, people with whom I was sharing my warnings simply could not bring themselves to believe that the benevolent US government could possibly ever lie to us all just to start a war.
Now, I know that you, my dear reader, might be chuckling at that, because I know my own reader community today consists of people who surely recognize how naive it is to maintain such an absurd belief: The US government? "Benevolent"? Ha!
But, yes, lots of people actually still think that way. Just like lots of people actually persist in perceiving everything through the lens of "Democrat vs. Republican", "liberal vs. conservative", "left vs. right", etc.
And that was my experience at the time. I just couldn't believe that people couldn't see what I saw so clearly: that the government was lying.
Anyhow, because it's such a timeless lesson, here's a relevant article for today from my archives, published in 2012: "The Lies that Led to the Iraq War and the Persistent Myth of ‘Intelligence Failure’":
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