An antidote to the lies about Iraq

The people who write history text books for Western children must one day contrive an acceptable version of the American-British invasion of Iraq. They will call it the Iraq War, just as those who wrote American high school texts on Indochina referred to the Vietnam War rather than the American invasion of Vietnam.

The orthodox narrative on Vietnam, as taught in American schools, recounts a noble cause in which American presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon tried more and varied means to bring freedom to Southeast Asia. (For no apparent reason, the Vietnamese resisted.) An ingredient of this fantasy is that the press turned against the war and took the public with it. This is, as anyone who lived in the United States or Vietnam at the time

knows, a lie. There is every reason to suppose the lies about Iraq will prevail as well.

The media, as in Vietnam, will give itself a good press: it will tell of upright journalists digging deep to expose the lies that killed about a million Iraqis, drove more than two million into exile and left more than another million homeless within Iraq. But it won't write about how most of the press backed the war - and how a great part of it still does.

I propose an antidote to the cant schoolchildren will be fed. Two books, both by Patrick Cockburn, tell the tale truthfully. The first is last year's The Occupation: War and Resistance and, just published, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq.

Cockburn, an Irish-born correspondent for The Independent, knows Iraq and ignores the party line. One example, Iraqisation of the war: "President Bush and Tony Blair repeatedly stated that American and British troops would leave when Iraqis were ready to take over. They never seemed to