Wag The Dog Analysis and the Iraq War

Are there striking similarities between the this movie and the “evidence” which became the precursor to the Iraq invasion? My opinion is “yes.” I have found several examples of comparisons to prove my point, but I decided to elaborate on one in particular.

There is a scene where an agent Charles Young, affiliated with an intelligence organization not mentioned by name but assumed as the CIA, had confronted both Conrad Brean and Winifred Ames about their publicized leaks of supposed Albanian terrorist groups planning to detonate modified nuclear suitcase devises en route through Canada . Agent Young grills them to know why this story is being fabricated when his own intelligence reports refute these claims.

Without a moment's pause, Conrad returned fire that the intelligence agency's lack of evidence on said terrorist threat claims should not be concluded as some concoction of the administration, but rather as inefficiency from Young's own organization... and if Agent Young wishes to remain employed, he'd better find faith in the claims of the Albanian threat set forth.

This scene was stunningly similar to the months leading up to, and resulting in, America's pre-emptive strike of Iraq. When a barrage of claims, entailing renewed Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam's Al Qaeda connections, from defectors harbored by Chabili's INC (an organization long hailed by neo-conservative idealogues as the foundation stone for a new Iraq and reviled as unreliable charlatans by the CIA) began to surface, the Bush administration quickly utilized such hearsay as talking points for invasion and regime change in Iraq... regardless of the scrambling efforts made by intelligence agencies such as Valerie Plame's Iraq Task Force to find substantial evidence to back such claims, but always coming up short.

Administration officials such a Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and I Lewis Libby had openly shown contempt for and harangued both CIA and pentagon officials whenever they failed to provide support, advise, and information sympathetic to the “Iraqi Liberation” cause... as if any counterpoint made was more proof of incompetence against those in disagreement with neo-conservative assessments than evidence that said assessments might not be as infallible as it was currently sold.

As for the media, in both cases fictional and historical, anonymous leaks and ambiguous sound-bites from official sources became the bait for the bulk of journalists racing for the most sensational story of the day, in order to placate a general public, affected by a recent crisis, more emotional than rational. In both cases, the media ran stories filled with eroneous information with very little fact-checking.

In the case of Judy Miller's aluminum tubes article published in the September 8 issue of the New York Times, it can be claimed that Al-Haideri's account was taken as gospel truth by Ms. Miller since all she had to do was confirm the claim with the CIA, which would have informed her that her source failed a lie detector test. And the situation worsened when subsequent charges by weapon inspector David Albright and Department of Energy consultant Houston Wood countered Al-Hairdi's accounts as erroneous, but follow-up articles were pretty much buried and primarily overlooked.

What made this particular event a great example of the tail wagging its dog is that Dick Cheney, one politically affiliated with the INC which produced the source for Ms. Miller's article, had actually quoted the aluminum tubes finding from that very article, published that morning, as grounds to believe that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons on Tim Russert's Meet the Press.

To conclude with a question: does this movie exaggeration the truth? Of course. All stories do when its purpose is to both inform AND entertain the viewer. But allow me to Socratically ascertain by asking, “Does art imitate life, or vice versa?”