I recently watched an episode on the PBS show Nature about crows. Evidently researchers now think that these birds are so intelligent that they can recognize human faces and can even use their system of calls to pass on information about specific people to other crows. One of the points that the show emphasized was that mental activities that were long considered unique to homo sapiens have now been verified in diverse areas of the animal kingdom.

What I took away from the show was somewhat different. I could not help wondering whether any of the crows were liars. I have long suspected that at least a few of the first dozen statements uttered by men were probably deliberate lies. Until prevarication by crows can be demonstrated by science, I will continue to believe in the superiority of our species. Even if such proof is forthcoming, I doubt that crows or any other animal have raised lying to the level of an art form the way that we humans have.

What ranks the biggest lie of the twenty-first century? Many people would probably nominate the Bush administration’s strident claim that there was “no doubt” that Iraq in 2003 possessed weapons of mass destruction. I strongly disagree. In fact, I am not sure that it was a lie at all. While the talking points that mentioned “smoking guns” and “mushroom clouds” were pure horse hockey, many knowledgeable people probably were pretty certain that Saddam Hussein still had a number of chemical weapons, which are relatively cheap, hanging around. After all, he had already deployed them once, and even the radical cult Aum Shinrikyo had managed to obtain enough sarin gas to attack the Japanese subway system in 1995. If you considered this type of chemical as a WMD, then it was reasonable to suppose that Iraq had some.

Far more outrageous was the linking of Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and his followers. From Osama’s perspective Saddam was perhaps the worst Muslim ruler in the world. He ran a secular state that tolerated a thriving Christian community; he even wrote trashy novels! ObL was a fanatical fundamentalist who had no use for an infidel like Saddam. The two had no relationship whatever. In fact, they almost certainly hated each other. The evidence that Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda consisted of one imaginary meeting in Prague between Muhammed Atta, the Egyptian student who organized the 9/11 attacks, and an Iraqi agent. This meeting never happened, and everyone knew it. However, that was not the big lie.

I came to recognize the actual big lie when I was sitting in the Burger King at the Kansas City airport a year or two after the initiation of the fiasco in Iraq. At a nearby table were a young couple, their two children, and an older couple who evidently were the grandparents. The striking thing to me was that the young adults were both dressed in camos and combat boots. They were evidently both in the military, and they were about to be deployed. What of the kids? I could only surmise that they would be staying with the grandparents. At least, I hoped so.

I was in the army during the tail end of our nation’s last major fiasco — Vietnam. I had been drafted, and the non-lifers that I knew had either been drafted or had volunteered to avoid the draft. A few of them were married, but of the hundreds of guys whom I encountered, I can only remember one person — an extremely poor fellow from Mississippi who joined up because it was the best job that he could find — who had any children. In those days having a wife and kids exempted a young man from the draft. Needless to say, the wife was already exempt because she was female, and women in those days were too weak or too hysterical or something to be trusted with fighting our wars. I had never even heard a rumor of a family that included children in which both parents were in the service and were shipped off to ‘Nam. Such a thing would have been just short of inconceivable.

So, the scene at the Burger King had a dramatic effect on me. How, I wondered, would the family explain to the children why both mommy and daddy had to leave them behind for several months. The answer was, of course, quite simple. They would almost certainly be told that mommy and daddy needed to go to Iraq to defend America. That was the big lie. The deception was originally started by Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of them, but it then became interwoven into the fabric of families all across America. No one would tell the children that their parents were leaving them behind because they were being well paid by the administration to implement the incredibly costly invasion of a country the ruler of which had never had the slightest intention of attacking America. He had just made the mistake of getting on the wrong side of a few people in Washington who took advantage of a two-bit terrorist attack to implement a grudge that they had been nursing for decades.

What happens when the children learn about the big lie? I suppose that a few will be disgusted with their parents’ choices, but most of them will probably still think of them as heroic figures who made a big sacrifice that saved the rest of us from the bad guys.