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up to the beaches and chaps storming out and lying on their tummies and wriggling up through barbed wire.” Relying on that, British reporters told the public that “hit and run” attacks were to be expected, rather than a major battle. Reporters in the United States and elsewhere followed suit, and were badly misled—as were the Argentine defenders. They were taken by surprise the following night when a full-scale amphibious operation commenced at points around an inlet called San Carlos Water on East Falkland Island. The roughly sixty Argentine defenders were overwhelmed, and soon at least 4,000 British troops were ashore. From that secure beachhead, they advanced on the island’s major settlements and forced an Argentine surrender less than a month later.

Reporters complained bitterly about the way in which they had been manipulated. Sir Terence Lewin, chief of the British defense staff, responded: “I do not see it as deceiving the press or the public; I see it as deceiving the enemy. What I am trying to do is to win. Anything I can do to help me win is fair as far as I’m concerned, and I would have thought that that was what the Government and the public and the media would want, too, provided the outcome was the one we were all after.” That’s the way military commanders have seen it since the time of the Greeks and the Trojans. The Chinese general Sun Tzu summed it up 2,500 years ago: “All warfare is based on deception.” We doubt that will change any time soon.

It is especially difficult to get the facts right in the chaos and confusion of war, as the Tonkin Gulf incident amply illustrates. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously observed in 1832 that leaders in battle operate in a kind of feeble twilight like “a fog or moonshine.” And because so much military information is classified, the public is in even worse shape when it comes to getting accurate information about war. Often the truth emerges only in histories written a generation or more after the event.

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The Fog of War

The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance. What this feeble light leaves indistinct to the sight, talent must discover, or must be left to chance.

—GENERAL CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War (1832)

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We can’t say how history would have turned out had American citizens known the truth about the Maine, or the truth about what happened in the Tonkin Gulf, or the truth about the Iraqi “baby killers” in 1991, or the truth about Saddam Hussein’s lack of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in 2003. In each case the United States had other reasons for war: the desire to grab pieces of Spain’s doddering empire in 1898; the wish to evict an aggressor from Kuwait and its oilfields in 1991. Perhaps none of the wars would have been averted. But then again, had the public known the facts, war fever might well have run lower, and leaders might have acted differently. We can never know for sure. What we do know is that the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and two Iraq wars were begun, at least in part, under false pretenses.

When war talk runs hot, keep an open mind and keep asking yourself, “I wonder how this will look when the history books are written?”

Fortunately, it’s not as hard to get current, accurate information about other matters that bear on our well-being. Even in a world of spin, ordinary citizens can call up reliable sources of information quickly and easily on the Internet. Do you want more information on that miracle prescription medication you saw advertised on television? The full list of side effects is only a few keystrokes away at the Food and Drug Administration’s website, and reputable consumer sites contain information about whether it works as well as advertised or is any better than cheaper generic drugs. At www.worstpills.org, for example, you can find