Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news.
> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact.
What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1].
We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them.
I was part of the protests. It was widely reported in the media that WMDs weren't found, that Iraq was cooperating with the UN, and that the government's evidence was debunked.
The "anti-war" thing was just a big-tent message that most of those against the war could agree to (with each group having their own reason for being against it).
As someone who was against the war, I would say I didn’t know they didn’t have WMDs.
What I did think was that even if they did, there were other options on the table and that those had not been pursued to their full extent. Yes Saddam was playing 3-card Monty, but never the less we had time at our disposal we also didn’t pursue corroborating evidence and it all seemed like making up a reason for war rather than an actual casus belli. I mean, so what some known terrorists had passage? It’s not as if Saddam didn’t have his own insurrections to deal with.
There was no nuance. It was all let’s go! Most dissenters were more like, slow down, we’re not there yet, we haven’t exhausted all options yet.
The UN Weapons inspectors debunked the WMDs before troops even entered the country.
> In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active program.
I don’t think that was conclusive (they didn’t have free access). Also, often times a first go at anything is typically faulty. It was; however, a reason to put things on hold and be more rigorous and investigate further.
I think mostly it was the establishment (Dems, Repubs, Globalists, etc. m) that wanted Saddam out, no matter what. Only old-style conservatives and leftists and other small constituencies dissented.
I’m not going to rehash the Iraq war timeline.. you’ve clearly missed my point. Just replace Iraq with gulf of Tonkin. That deception lasted a lot longer.
The correct information was available, but largely ignored by mass media. For example:
> 13 March 2003
> The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.
> Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.
> Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student's thesis).
> General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons programme.
[...]
> In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.
> For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.
> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact.
Key US/UK claims were debunked by UN weapons inspectors in the same UN hearing where they were presented.
That the “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction” weren't the mobile WMD labs they were portrayed as (and that the US and UK knew because the UK had literally sold them to Iraq) was also also public before the war.
> In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news
No, worse, it would just be ignored by large masses of the public who would believe the government anyway, and even forget that they'd been given repeated information about how they were being lied to.
