The Iraq War started the post-truth era. And America is to blame | Moustafa Bayoumi

We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. By 2.40pm on 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden).

Of course, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. (Which was probably when politicians were also invented.) And Bush is hardly the first US president to march the country into war based on a lie. Goaded on by the media baron William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley led the US into the Spanish-American war on a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie.

The world is still reeling from the consequences of these lies and the institutions built on them. In the US, they continue to corrode our politics. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are overrepresented in far-right movements in this country. Public trust in government is near an all-time low, having fallen precipitously during the Bush years. And social media companies have taken up the mantle of amplifying the lies our politicians tell.