JOSEF Goebbels was firmly of the view that if an untruth, no matter how blatant, is repeated frequently enough, it gains widespread acceptance. Put into practice, this theory did indeed play a crucial role in mesmerising a significant proportion of the German populace.

Within 10 years, however, the vast majority of Germans knew that they had been hoodwinked by the Nazis, with disastrous consequences.

More than half a century on, one would have thought that the ongoing revolution in communications and the delivery of information would have relegated the Goebbels school of thought to irrelevance. But in the aftermath of 9/11 it became clear that, given conducive circumstances, it remains possible to release a big lie into the atmosphere and watch it spread like a toxic cloud. Amid the trauma of a nation that had never before suffered a foreign blow on the mainland, a large number of Americans had no trouble believing that Saddam Hussein’s regime was behind the toppling of the twin towers.

What, they were persuaded to wonder, would Saddam do next? Why, he would try to use his weapons of mass destruction to shatter the American dream. So, how should the US respond? It was a no-brainer: pre-emption was the only option. That would not only enhance homeland security, it would also be seen by the people of Iraq as a huge favour. And once the Iraqis had stopped celebrating for long enough to institute a free-market democracy, they would become the envy of the Middle East, a shining role model for all Arabs.

This elaborate fantasy, based on a series of falsehoods, did encounter some resistance, not least among intelligence analysts who saw no Iraqi connection with 9/11 and were confident that even if the Iraqi dictator had a few matériel surprises up his sleeve, he wouldn’t dare to use them. Others fretted that an invasion may be followed by complete chaos, with Al Qaeda and Iran emerging as the chief beneficiaries.

The doubters, by and large, were directly or indirectly intimidated into keeping their peace — which is exactly what George W. and the neocons didn’t intend to do.

It was inevitable that most of their lies would eventually be exposed. The resistance in Iraq hastened the process. By last year it became clear that most Americans were aware that their president and his aides had been profoundly dishonest.

There weren’t many mass protests, but opinion polls suggested the majority of the electorate realised that the war in Iraq was immoral and unwinnable. In congressional elections, they handed a working majority in both houses to the opposition Democratic Party, many of whose stalwarts had initially supported the war, but had subsequently backed away as the word ‘quagmire’ came back into fashion.

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to withdraw most combat units from Iraq by next April. Meanwhile, as the gap between public opinion and the White House continues to grow, a number of Republican senators — most of whom are up for re-election in November 2008 — have made it clear that they no longer adhere to the administration’s position.

One is tempted to view this as progress. It seemingly feeds into the assumption that even if the occupation is maintained for the remaining 18 months of the Bush-Cheney regime, it will be dismantled shortly afterwards. But a closer look at the position of the Democratic Party and the supposedly anti-war Republicans proves disconcerting, because almost no one among the political class favours a complete withdrawal. They want the Iraqi army to take over combat operations, with a smaller contingent of US forces providing training and back-up, and keeping Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia at bay.

This isn’t all that different from what appears to be the Bush administration’s Plan B: cutting the US presence in Iraq by about half and retreating into well-guarded bases, from where air strikes and ground missions can be launched at will. This belated semi-exit strategy cannot work, not least because the remaining troops will continue to be perceived as an occupation army.

The American desire for permanent military bases in the region has widely been recognised since the Kuwait crisis led to the first Gulf war 16 years ago, and the Australian defence minister, Brendan Nelson, recently offered official confirmation of a primary premise of the Iraq invasion when he stated that his country backed the US because of the need to secure energy supplies.

Most Arabs have never been under any illusion on this score. As enduring symbols of a hated occupation, long-term bases will inevitably be targeted. The Americans will retaliate, and after a few months the question of a surge will rear its grotesque head once more.

Administration officials have lately been citing the Korean example as the model for an indefinite military presence in Iraq. Memories of the miserable puppet military regimes that held sway in South Korea for more than three decades may have receded in the light of its raucous democracy and thriving capitalist economy, but perhaps the more significant point is that Iraq in 2007 bears little resemblance to South Korea in 1953.

Even more bizarrely, Bush referred late last month to Israel as an ideal that Iraq should aspire to. But then, hardly anyone expects the US president to make a great deal of sense. In an Independence Day speech to members of the National Guard, he compared present-day American soldiers with those who fought in the Revolutionary War. There is a slight difference, though. Back in the late 18th century, it was the Americans who were the insurgents, locked in combat with the occupying army of Bush’s namesake, King George III. Fortunately, it was the American freedom fighters who triumphed — with a bit of help from France. Less than a century later, they fought against each other — and one could say, at a stretch, that the fundamentalists lost. So why look at South Korea and Israel when there are useful lessons to be learnt from American history?

Of course, one can only hope that no one adopts the Bush administration as an exemplar —although its conduct should serve as a warning, particularly to successor regimes, for a long time to come. Its tendency towards misleading Americans has not diminished with experience. Last week George W. was at it again, saying that the US could not extract itself from Iraq as long as Al Qaeda remained functional in that country — implying that the organisation in question, founded by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in the wake of the US invasion and thus named in homage to the bloodcurdling reputation acquired by Osama bin Laden’s outfit, was somehow behind the atrocities of 9/11.

Not only that, but the blistering illogic of arguments such as “if we don’t fight them in Basra and Baghdad, we’ll have to fight them in Boston and Baltimore” continues to be regurgitated, while the plethora of evidence that the occupation of Iraq is a prime cause of the international upsurge in terrorism is blithely ignored.

Reports this week that Dick Cheney has succeeded in improving the odds for aggression against Iran provide further cause for alarm. Whatever one’s opinion of the regime in Tehran, it’s not hard to see why an attack on Iran would be an even bigger crime than the war in Iraq. But damage limitation is evidently not a concept that the Bush-Cheney clique is familiar with, and its eagerness to extend the killing fields is partly based on the suspicion that the next US administration won’t be equally trigger-happy.

A senior neoconservative journalist with close connections to the White House recently suggested that US forces planned to intervene directly in Waziristan in order to tackle tasks that the Pakistan army was unable to perform. This was followed last week by a warning from senior British generals to Downing Street that the Afghan military campaign is teetering on the brink of failure, and “if we fail in Afghanistan, then Pakistan goes down”.

That is unquestionably a frightening prospect, but one wonders whether anyone who stalks the corridors of power in Islamabad, Kabul, London, Washington or Baghdad realises that the threats that have arisen partly as a consequence of gratuitous aggression cannot be tackled by military means alone.

The casual brutalisation that military occupation inevitably entails has lately been highlighted by an investigation undertaken by the progressive American magazine The Nation, based on interviews with 50 Iraq war veterans. The published report makes for sobering reading. It doesn’t dwell on particularly egregious atrocities such as the Haditha massacre but focuses on the everyday violence that has consumed so many innocent lives, bringing out what the First World War poet Wilfred Owen described as “The pity of war, the pity war distilled”.

No one with even rudimentary humanitarian impulses could be unmoved, to cite but one example, by 24-year-old Specialist Michael Harman’s encounter with a “pudgy little two-year-old with cute little pudgy legs”. When the occupation army’s troops responded to an explosion with a shooting spree, a bullet pierced one of those pudgy little legs. “And this baby looked at me,” recalls Harman. “[She] wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything ... I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?”

Why indeed.

It’s easier to launch a stupid war than to end it. A complete American withdrawal would be the least worst option in the existing circumstances. Unfortunately, it could be a long time coming.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com