The Big Lie

"They hate our freedom." So intones King George II when he goes about attempting to lamely justify the Iraq quagmire, or to explain why a large amount of the Muslim world is determined to see harm come to the USA. Nothing could be further from reality. What the great majority of the Muslim world despises is American government policies that concerns them: aid to Isreal and supporting the ubiquitious corrupt local governments (who's only skill is in repressing their own people & looting their countries) in exchange for oil and / or other considerations.
What makes the big lie necessary is that the vast majority of the American people do not consider the narrow interests of the oil industry worthy of their blood. So therefore the whole sorry affair needs to given an Orwellian "newspeak" spin in order for enough of the American public to go along. So instead the American public was fed lies, exaggerations, and progaganda posing as news (Fox News was the acme of this).
A great amount of it was repudiated, but the Republican Noise Machine managed to brainwash enough of the American public to forge on anyway. So while most of the rest of the First World looks on with a combination of horror and amusement, the USA continues to make a fool of itself while simultaneously hiking up the danger level for the West (Nukes, chemical & biological weapons are well within the reach of Islamic terrorists).
After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had a historic opportunity to combat terrorism with the majority of the world on its' side (even a good amount of the Islamic world included). Instead, they spectacularly pissed it away on George II's pathological need to make good King George I's biggest foreign policy error: ending the Gulf War too early, then letting Saddam's Republican Guard put down the post-war revolts amongst the Shiites and the Kurds (after George I had urged them to "rise up").
George I forgot some very basic lessons of statecraft that any reader of material such as "The Prince" by Machiavelli knows well. If you need to do something unpleasant: do it in one swift stroke and as soon as possible. Another is to take advantage of any opportunity fate throws your way, it will likely never arrive again...and making the objective so at a later point in time will usually be a harder task. The Bush Dynasty is able to get away with bumbling statecraft because just enough of the American public has been hypnotized by the Goebels-like repeatition of the big lie. "If you repeat the big lie enough, the masses will believe it." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf