The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

“Power is impenetrable,” wrote Elias Canetti, in his 1960 study of paranoia in politics. “The man who has it sees through other men, but does not allow them to see through him.”

The worst thing about the Iraq war was not that people got away with lying. It was that they did not—and it did not matter.

Plenty of people got Iraq wrong, but plenty of people—experts and ordinary citizens—got it right. The problem was that it made no difference.

“Without evidence, confidence cannot arise,” Hans Blix declared to the United Nations in the run-up to the war. He was wrong: confidence, like evidence, could be created.

The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived.

That was the message of the Iraq war: there is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.

We laugh bitterly at the “Mission Accomplished” sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.