Lies beget more lies. A liar must create bigger lies in order to cover for previous lies.
The bigger the lies, the easier they are to spot.
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to war.

""The first casualty when war comes is truth"
- Hiram W Johnson

Remember what started the GWOT? We were out to destroy al-Qaeda, right? That was our objective.
So what was the Pentagon's reaction to Russia bombing al-Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria? It wasn't happy.

Senior U.S. military leaders and defense officials are debating whether military force should be used to protect Washington-backed Syrian rebels who have come under attack by Russian airstrikes in recent days.

Think about that for a moment. If you gave some money to al-Qaeda, you would be convicted as a traitor and spend the rest of your life in jail.
However, when the CIA uses your tax money to train al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorists it's legal.
Washington is even considering having a military confrontation with Russia in order to defend the same group that murdered Americans on 9/11.
Just how far do you have to go down the rabbit hole for this to make any sense at all?

The only way that this can make any logical sense is to recognize that the entire purpose of this war is based on lies. Very big lies.

Recall that it isn't just al-Qaeda that we are trying to destroy. We are trying to destroy all terrorists, especially ones that have killed American soldiers.
Except that is not true.

Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups are now sharing a military base with US military personnel in Iraq's Anbar province, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake of Bloomberg View report.
The Shiite militia groups are overseen by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who is a former commander of Iraqi Hezbollah and a close ally of Iranian military mastermind Qassem Suleimani....
Iraqi Hezbollah, also known as Kataeb Hezbollah, is listed by the US government as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group and has American blood on its hands.
Muhandis, who has been accused of orchestrating the bombings of both the US and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2009 for his role in carrying out destabilizing actions within Iraq at Iran's insistence...The group to this day boasts of its killing of U.S. soldiers.

American GI's are sharing a military base, and basically working alongside, a terrorist group that has killed dozens of American GI's. I guess some terrorists are good enough to be allies.
At least the Shia militia terrorist allies don't cut off people's heads and burn prisoners alive. Oh wait. Our allies cut off heads and burn prisoners alive too.

How can someone justify working alongside terrorist allies that have killed your soldiers, and who burn prisoners alive, while still feigning outrage when your enemies do it? I simply don't have that double-think ability. But Orwell had an answer to that question.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
- George Orwell

The extreme double-standards for when it comes to our allies goes much farther afield than that.

Consider how just one day after we warned Russia about civilian casualties in Syria, we bombed a working hospital in Afghanistan.

If that wasn't bad enough, this comes just a few days after our Saudi Arabian allies killed 130 civilians at a wedding party in Yemen.
So what does a Saudi bombing have to do with us bombing a hospital? Because the U.S. blocked a UN investigation into the Saudi bombing, and instead preferred that the Saudis investigate themselves.

Notice the terminology. The Russians killed "civilians" with their bombs. We only created "collateral damage".

Speaking of Afghanistan and our allies there, there was another recent scandal.

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

I'm pretty sure that gang-raping young boys is not acceptable in any culture.
If that wasn't bad enough, consider this part of the story.

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

We punished GI's who stopped young boys from being enslaved and raped.
Is this part of winning hearts and minds? How does one reconcile this hypocrisy?

The only way this war works is if the news media largely ignores the hypocrisy and contradictions, and the public actively pretends not to acknowledge it. The public must simply put their own values aside out of loyalty to the ruling elite.

“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force. The slave must know no higher law than his master’s will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate to his mind it’s necessity, but it’s absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chain.”
– Frederick Douglass

To make this X-rated war acceptable, you have to make it appear PG.
For instance, consider our Drone War, which is really nothing but an global assassination program.
It's sold to us as "precise" and "surgical", but the fact is that more than 90% of the time we have no idea who we are killing.
So far this year in Yemen we've killed more civilians than al-Qaeda. So who are the bad guys again?

Until 2009, it was illegal to photograph the coffins of GI's coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans dying in combat was an abstract concept that politicians and the media could play with.
Consider the death of Pat Tillman. They could have said it was a tragic, friendly-fire accident. But this is war, and lies are just another part of war.

So if the military is going to lie about the deaths of American soldiers, why shouldn't they lie about the deaths of civilians, our allies, and our enemies?
We've tortured innocent people to death, and still the public supports torture. Not only that, war supporters will still manage real outrage over our enemies committing the exact same atrocities we are doing.
Not only that, our enemies can shift and become our allies (see al-Qaeda and Kataeb Hezbollah), and the public support for the war doesn't waver. After all, we've always been at war with Eastasia.

This thinking requires the mind of a slave.