The demonization of Iraq with a post-9/11 vocabulary began in earnest during the anthrax attacks of October 2001. Even after the FBI, CIA and the Department of Health and Human Services declared that the anthrax mailings were far more likely to be the work of a domestic terrorist, closer to the Unabomber than to al-Qaida, suggestion of possible Iraqi responsibility continued to be packaged into sound bites by prominent members of the Bush administration and distributed by the media without counterargument. As recently as Sept. 8, three days prior to the somber 9/11 anniversary, Vice President Dick Cheney conspicuously dangled the possibility of Saddam's involvement during an interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press."

However, if there was a formal declaration that Iraq was to be fused into the traumatized idiom of 9/11, it came a year ago during George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, with the notorious "axis of evil" reference. "Evil" had been clearly inducted into the understanding of the terrorist attacks, and the description of Iraq in those terms immediately annexed it to 9/11.

With relentless consistency, we then witnessed the morphing of al-Qaida into Iraq, and of Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein. It was a case of psychological transference on a national scale. The transformation came not by cognitive argument, but by emotional association -- Iraq was described persistently in the emotionally charged post-9/11 vocabulary and context, most often by an association with fear, anxiety and alarm.

In contrast, distracting truths such as the extent of Saudi fingerprints were generally talked down. The revisionism reached its most ambitious, and farcical, when Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Reagan's former assistant secretary of defense, used Fox News and his Washington Times column in an attempt to implicate Saddam Hussein in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Gaffney has also speculated on Iraqi involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and the 9/11 attacks.

Mainstream America slowly began to emerge from its hypnosis only after retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a close Bush family ally, published a cautionary Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, and brought legitimacy to open discussion of the merits of war. It rapidly fell back into a hypnotic state for much of the fall by the anniversary of 9/11 and by Bush's U.N. address. The revival of national consciousness and of discussion only truly accelerated with the onset of winter, by which time the Pentagon had already moved its discussion on to the troop deployment phase.

We have probably slept too long. Congress has waived its right to wage war. The doctrine of preemption has been elucidated, even if only for this purpose. The mass military mobilization is in place. The support is not strong, but a sufficient bloc of Americans have now integrated Iraq into their understanding of 9/11 to provide Bush with a critical mass of core support, independent of any logical rationale for invasion and occupation.

That the administration and the military of a nation -- even a great democratic nation -- should attempt to use disinformation to manufacture consent for an agenda should come as no surprise, even if it does disappoint and anger. That such an indubitable historical revisionism of 9/11 could occur can be seen as nothing less than a complete and profound failure of the media to protect the American people from virulent propaganda.

But true as it is that the science of mass media long ago discovered that what sells and what informs are very often polarized, the American public has not yet been deprived of the free will to seek out truth and knowledge. The public is equally responsible for its ignorance. The division between the true world and the media-driven perceived world has widened to such an extent that we were unable even to understand the questions demanded by 9/11; a mass cognitive dissonance was averted when "evil" was tacitly determined to be the official explanation for the terrorist attacks. As long as the popular understanding of "reality" continues to be a group of yesterday's celebrities on a stylized mobile set in outback Australia, Americans have little hope of understanding the world, much less their role within it.

When the theme is war, the principal ethical directive of the media must be to effect a complete, transparent and balanced disclosure of truth, with a clear separation of media and state. It is a directive that does not in any way preclude editorial support of government opinion, but it must protect the right to the free public expression of dissent without persecution. And when the theme is war, citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to cherish that right and to use it vigorously.

In this case, that was probably destined never to happen.

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