Was reminded in conversation the other day of 'The Power of Nightmares', a BBC programme that I missed a few weeks ago. Anyway, it can be watched online, albeit in a barely watcheable version and with a useful transcript. It concentrates, initially, on the US neo-cons and their Straussian doctrines of the 'noble lie,' and the strict policing and propagation of the friend/ foe distinction. The idea was consciously to exaggerate various external threats in order to secure domestic cohesion. (All this also ties in with Strauss’s ideas about esoteric and exoteric meanings). Its contemporary relevance is obvious.
See also this article:
.. our Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once noted in an off the cuff remark, strategic truths sometimes need be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.”[i] Here Rumsfeld was thinking no doubt of Churchill’s famous quip defending Operation Fortitude, the mock invasion force aimed at Calais that drew the attention of Herr Hitler and his high command away from the Normandy beaches and hid the Allies’ operational plans in the summer of 1944. Rumsfeld’s critics in Washington and London, however, have in mind more the history of contemporary philosophy than the history of WWII.
In the past few months, the “bodyguard of lies” metaphor has been redeployed and used to characterize the Bush Administration’s raw manipulation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies for propaganda purposes and for the gross deceit that seems to characterize the rationales put forward for their Iraq policy. Of these there were many--WMDs, a suspected connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, or the humanitarian rescue of the Iraqi people. They shifted depending on their intended audience and perhaps the day of the week. The “imminent threat” of WMD’s were emphasized for the British public while links to “Al Qaeda-like terrorism” were stressed at home – where the fiction that Saddam was directly involved in the September 2001 attacks has been firmly embraced by over two thirds of the American public. As Olivier Roy rightly noted last May, ”Washington’s stated war goals were not logically coherent, and its more intellectually compelling arguments were usually played down or denied.” [ii]