"The
first casualty when war comes is truth." Hiram W Johnson. This quote is also
sometimes attributed to the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.
It’s
not easy to get Americans to support war. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed
journalist George Creel as Chairman of the new Committee for Public
Information. In an article for The American Experience, Nicholas Cull wrote, “For two years, he rallied the
American public to the cause of war and sold the globe a vision of America and
President Wilson’s plans for a world order. He was a controversial figure in
wartime Washington, but his efforts changed the ideological landscape at home
and abroad, and many of the methods and approaches he pioneered became a
standard part of U.S. statecraft.”
Near
the beginning of the 21st century, George W. Bush and his team made
the case for war in Iraq based primarily on intelligence reports that the
regime in Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The war was undertaken and Saddam
Hussein was captured. However, the evidence of WMDs was not as strong as the pre-war intelligence indicated.
