There are lies which are truths for others and vice versa. But in the daily press the official version usually gets top billing. So here's the truth about Iraq, which by contrast reveals the daily lies about that country.

Whatever Saddam Hussein was or wasn't (and even to some who detested him he is beginning to seem better than Bush for Iraq), he kept law and order. Iraq at the moment is on the verge of a civil war between the USA-sponsored army and the "insurgents" and "combatants" ("thugs and killers" in Bush's choice prose).

Iraq was occupied and now it is supposedly self-ruling. But, one, the new Iraqi "government" is an issue of the occupation set up, (2) it has virtually no authority of its own, (3) the American occupation authority remains in place, and (4), according to the high Pentagon official who combs his hair with saliva, American troops are going to remain in Iran for years to come.

Rumsfeld's pro-active friendship with Saddam Hussein on behalf of president Reagan was in part due to the information that the Baath party was secularist, hence anti-theocratic Iran, America's number one Satan. This bit of "intelligence" was true enough, although it failed to reflect that vis à vis Israel Iraq and Iran would have formed rank. Bush waged war against Iraq on precisely the contrary intelligence (this time wrong): that Hussein was in league with the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden. One of the indisputable results of the American occupation of Iraq is that secularism is giving way to terrorist religious fanaticism, which is what initiated on 9/11 the chain leading to the invasion of Iraq. And so it goes.

The final irony about Iraq is that American has gone full circle from toppling a tyrant to trying to prevent him from returning to power, which is what probably would happen if Iraqis were given half a chance. To stem this unthinkable, press-reflected officialese harps on about Iraq being 60% Shiite, as if Shiites were more amenable to American occupation than other Iraqis.

The Second Iraqi war, in the current official version, began with sources lying to the CIA, who lied to Bush, who lied to the American people, who swallowed it whole (not all of them of course). Powell, Bush's heavy-duty whitewasher, is now peddling this story, which puts the blame on "sources", and sidesteps the near likelihood that it was Bush (and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Powell himself) who told the CIA to take the "sources" at their words.

Once you lie so much, lying becomes habitual, and you just lie as naturally as breathing. The master of the lie, Bush the younger, has become so adept that he even lies when telling the truth, as when recently he said "no one likes being occupied" when he knows that the occupation and the travails of Iraq are going on and on and on…at least as long as he can keep up his act.