Editorial A Texas-sized lie

It's been said, the bigger the lie, the more likely the lie is to be believed. Sounds like something right out of Texas.

Now we learn from the British Broadcasting Corporation that the made-for-TV rescue of Private Jessica Lynch really was ... made for TV.

The night vision cameras showing special forces storming the hospital by helicopter? The firing of guns? Not necessary.

Oh, Jessica was captured, no doubt about that. But her captors fled, and Iraqi hospital workers attempted to take Lynch to the Americans by ambulance two days before the "rescue." They were driven back by American fire.

The dramatic raid took place, even though witnesses said that "the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital," according to the BBC report. The rescuers could have simply driven to the front door.

The claim that U.S. forces came "under fire from inside and outside the building" was also false. So were early reports that Lynch had suffered beatings in the hospital, and stab wounds.

The service men and women involved are heroes. They could have died in that rescue. Their heroism is not diminished by the fact that this was part of a Republican campaign to manipulate American voters.

But the whole rescue may have been a lie, similar to King George's landing on the carrier Abraham Lincoln to welcome the sailors home from war. Americans were told King George had to fly out in a jet because the carrier was too far to take a helicopter. In fact, the carrier was just off the coast. Republicans had the Navy turn the carrier around so when the jet landed, the entire world wouldn't see San Diego serene in the background.

It was another staged campaign event that actually kept the sailors at sea and away from their families longer than necessary.

Some of this may be an attempt to bury the image of Bush as a failed National Guard pilot during the Viet Nam War, who may in fact have been AWOL during a portion of his service. But that doesn't really matter.

Our pretext for the war, the weapons of mass destruction, have not been found. They may be ... or we may never find them.

"The absence of proof is not the proof of absence," cops like to say. But when we are cop, judge and jury, it doesn't matter. It's true simply because we say it.

We may have spent $80 billion on bombs and jet fuel that we could have spent on bridges and hospitals and schools over here. But it doesn't matter. They had a plan, and we couldn't be trusted to understand it.

Now, over Memorial Day weekend, Bush puppet masters murmured that they would like to "destabilize" the government of Iran. The pretext is that Iran may be harboring Al Qaeda.

There are far more Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, as well as schools that create them. There is more democracy in Iran than in Saudi Arabia, more freedom for women. Perhaps we have greater reason to destabilize the House of Saud.

But in this era when the package matters more than the product, truth does not matter. We've eliminated the government of Afghanistan, such as it was, and the government of Iraq. Iran must feel like the meat in a sandwich, with the U.S. prepared to take another bite.

Maybe our reason is their nuclear power program. Perhaps there doesn't have to be a reason. Maybe we can just smack them around because they say things we don't like.

That may even work in the short term. But over the long haul, we are unlikely to be successful because they love their country like we love ours, we don't understand them and they don't like us.

We are losing Afghanistan again, a mess we created and then failed to clean up in the 1980s. We could still lose Iraq. Did we not realize that there would need to be electricity and police and clean water and courts when the fighting was done?

But the real tragedy is the human cost. There have been body bags in this war. Hundreds of U.S. and British service men and women have died, and many thousands of Iraqis. It is time to ask why.

It was not to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but to drive a U.S. wedge right into the heart of an Arab world spiraling out of our control. Saddam was an evil man and the world is better off that he is gone.

But we lied about our reasons. And as lies go, this one was a whopper.