But any sane person knows, there are indeed objective facts and truths. And over the past several weeks, thanks to the inadvertent efforts of one man, the historical pattern of Islamic propaganda tap-dancing was exposed for the sham that it has always been. That man is Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Iraq’s former minister of information.
Al-Sahhaf (or as the media liked to call him, Baghdad Bob) was as skilled a liar as any of the above mentioned individuals. One might even say that Baghdad Bob was the epitome of all Arab propagandists, the would-be poster boy for Liars Anonymous. What set Baghdad Bob apart from the other liars was his comical visage and the use of live split-screen television. With humorous, almost humane eyes, an ample rounded nose, and a beret jauntily perched on his head, Baghdad Bob instantly brought back memories of television’s other great comedic liar, Jon Lovitz’s hilarious Pathological Liar, a recurring character on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the 1980’s.
Daily, Baghdad Bob point-blankly insisted to the world that Saddam Hussein and his henchmen were peaceful, religious people. He railed against the atrocities that he claimed America, Britain, and their Zionist handlers were committing against Islamic peoples. Bob fervently assured the global audience that Iraq would be victorious, cut the heads off of the American invaders, and kick the soldiers in their behinds as they ran away.
Who can forget the laughable sight of Baghdad Bob and his cronies during the opening hours of the war as they tried conducting a serious press conference while ignoring the sounds of American bombing and the shaking of the studio’s cloth backdrop from the resultant explosions?
Then there was the bit with Baghdad Bob rejecting the notion that Saddam International Airport had been captured, while on the other side of the screen we saw footage of American troops strolling through the airport’s shopping concourse.
The piece de resistance (excuse my French — no, really, excuse my use of anything French) was his dogged denial that American tanks were parked along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. As a viewer, I felt certain that at any moment a U.S. soldier would walk up behind Bob and tap him on the shoulder, at which point Bob would turn the opposite way, peer off into the distance, and then turn back to the camera and say, “Where? I don’t see any American tanks.”
The only thing missing from Baghdad Bob’s diatribes to truly make them classic comic masterpieces was a tag line to equal Lovitz’s “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
Humor aside, what these episodes with Baghdad Bob proved is that even in the face of undeniable, incontrovertible evidence, these people will lie at any cost rather than admit a truth that is unfavorable to their position.
It was fortunate for Yasir Arafat that last year, when he was screaming on live television about a massacre occurring in Jenin, that CNN didn’t do a live split-screen feed to show what was really happening. But there may be a reason why CNN didn’t supply a live split-screen feed that would have exposed Arafat’s lies, and the reason is much deeper than just not having the technology to do so.
Which brings up my final point in the lessons to be learned from the Iraq War. It is also the most disturbing and sinister revelation of them all.
While we may not yet have discovered the so-called smoking gun in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction, we do now have the smoking gun in the Arabs’ arsenal of Weapons of Mass Disinformation. And that smoking gun is CNN, the cable television network headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
