Book excerpt: America's crimes against the people of Iraq were shielded from public scrutiny by what senior U.S. military officers called the quiet, disguised, media-free approach developed in Central America in the 1980s. The echo chamber of the Western corporate media fleshed out the Pentagon's propaganda to create a virtual Iraq in the minds of the public, feeding a political discourse that bore no relation to the real war it was waging, the country it was destroying or the lives of its inhabitants. Davies takes apart the wall of propaganda surrounding one of history's most significant military disasters and most serious international crimes: non-existent WMDs; the equally fictitious centuries-old sectarian blood feud in Iraq; and the secrecy of the dirty war waged by American-led death squads. He places each aspect of the war within a context of illegal aggression, hostile military occupation and popular resistance, to uncover the brutal reality of a war that has probably killed at least a million people. From publisher description.