What Are Public Schools Teaching Kids about the Iraq War?

I am happy to say that my son is homeschooled, which is a decision my wife and I made for many reasons, including our desire to protect him from being indoctrinated with statist propaganda.

We prefer him to have a free mind than to suffer from mental slavery.

I was in the public school system and know from my own experience how critical it is to de-indoctrinate yourself if you want to understand reality.

“You must unlearn what you have learned,” as Yoda says.

Victims of indoctrination have an illusory view of the world. Most Americans suffer from outright delusional beliefs, and this is a huge obstacle toward humankind becoming civilized.

When you put your kids into the government school system, it should be no surprise that they are indoctrinated into the belief that the government is awesome.

Sure, government officials sometimes make mistakes, but only ever out of benevolent intent. And even if there are sometimes bad actors, the government itself is a shining beacon of light. We need the government to take care of us and guide our way.

Talk about delusional!

Since our son isn’t in that school system, I don’t know what the US history textbooks teach about the Iraq War, but I imagine it is similar to the homeschooling lesson we had this week with the history textbook that we chose to buy for his fifth-grade learning.

The chapter covered the Vietnam War, too. A chapter review question asks why President Lyndon B. Johnson sent American troops to Vietnam, and the expected answer is because he wanted to protect South Vietnam from the evil North Vietnamese Communists.

So, I had to explain to my son why that is deceptive. First of all, it wasn’t so much the US protecting the Vietnamese people in the south from the Vietnamese people in the north as much as it was the US protecting the government of South Vietnam from its own people.

I also explained to him how Johnson got his declaration of war from Congress by lying that US ships had come under attack by the North Vietnamese — an attack that never occurred. Naturally, the textbook left out that little detail.

It got even worse when it came to the section about “Operation Desert Storm” in 1991 and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in 2003.

The book explains the 1991 Gulf War as a glorious effort by the US to enforce UN Security Council resolutions by coming to Kuwait’s defense against the invading forces of the evil Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There’s a remark about how, after that short war, the world had concerns about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Naturally, there is no explanation of how the US supported Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s, including in Iraq’s war against Iran, or how the US supplied the evil dictator with arms and the precursors he used for his WMD, including the chemical weapons used in 1988 to “gas his own people” — as we were incessantly reminded in 2002 and 2003 to manufacture consent for the 2003 invasion, with selective amnesia about how the US had been supporting Hussein at that time.

Nor, of course, is there any mention of how Hussein expressed his intentions toward Kuwait on the grounds that Kuwait was “slant drilling” oil out of the Rumaila oilfield in Iraq, and how the US government’s response to Hussein was to tell him that the US had no interest in Iraq’s dispute with Kuwait — an effective green light for Iraq to invade.

The book also does not explain that the Security Council authorized member states to use force only to expel invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait, not to invade Iraq as the US did, which rendered the US invasion counter-aggression under international law. There is no mention of the gruesome US massacre of fleeing Iraqi forces in Iraqi territory.

Worse still is the book’s treatment of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was an illegal war of aggression, “the supreme international crime” as defined during the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunals.

Here, the textbook explains how Iraq was “suspected” of having WMD, which is in itself deceitful because the George W. Bush administration didn’t say they “suspected” this but that they knew it for a fact — which is to say that the government was lying to create a pretext to manufacture consent for a war for regime change.

Then the chapter outright lies that President Bush launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in March 2003 because Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors. In fact, Hussein did cooperate with the inspections regime, and inspectors were in the country verifying Iraq’s disarmament until the US invasion put an end to their efforts.

You would also think the fact that the US government later acknowledged the fact that Iraq had no WMD because it had been effectively disarmed by UN weapons inspectors back in 1991 following the Gulf War is a rather important detail — but evidently the authors of the textbook felt it was too trivial to bother mentioning.

It’s not generally a terrible history textbook. It has served its purpose of helping us teach our son about key people and events from US history. As for the instances of pure propaganda that it includes, I view this as a useful opportunity to explain to our son what we are supposed to believe and how that contrasts with historical reality.

It’s useful, in other words, for teaching him critical thinking skills and not to believe everything he reads just because the information is from sources that are supposedly non-fiction.

We’re about finished with this textbook, and I’m weighing whether to buy the sixth-grade history book from the same series or to abandon it.

We’ve already purchased a great pro-liberty alternative aimed at providing a corrective to all the statist propaganda we learned in the government school system, which is The Tuttle Twins: America’s History.

I’m excited about diving into this set with my son, but at the same time, I think it’s good for him to know about the statist propaganda that other kids are learning, so I’m kinda torn on whether to use both.

What do you think? Would you continue using the same textbook series even though it contains some instances of horrible propaganda, or would you abandon it? Let me know in the comments below.

And if you’re a parent with children in school, I’m really curious to know what their textbooks teach about the Iraq War. Do you know? If not, I encourage you to take a look, and please do let me know!

Back in the day, I was speaking out against the war propaganda and warning how the government was lying about Iraq having WMD to start an illegal war of aggression. That’s actually what got me started publishing articles, which ultimately led me onto this path of doing research and journalism for a living.

In 2012, I published this article as a pretty comprehensive compilation of my prior research and writings exposing how there was no “intelligence failure” leading up to the 2003 Iraq War; rather, there was a deliberate campaign of deception:

Here’s the pro-liberty and anti-statist-propaganda two-volume US history textbook I mentioned:

Don’t forget to let me know your own thoughts in the comments below, and if you have kids in school, please share with us what they are learning or have learned about the so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”!

Update, June 21, 2024: Ed in the comments below reminded us also of the US government’s use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, which I also wrote about in this 2005 essay: