Gerorge Orwell once remarked: "The enemy of clear language is insincerity". And he should know: as the creator of the term 'newspeak' in Nineteen Eighty-Four, his then-futuristic warning against ideological dictatorships, he wrote about the concept of propaganda as a tool of control.

In this, of course, he was preceded in real life by the likes of Goebbels who first introduced a ministry of information that actually meant the opposite. As the Nazi information minister, he demonstrated the truth of his observation: "The bigger the lie, the more often you repeat it; and the more often you repeat it, the more easily people accept it as the truth".

In cruder forms, governments have been using propaganda for their own purposes since time immemorial. The ancient Egyptians (and other civilizations as well) made deities of their kings and queens so that their power and authority could not be questioned by mere mortals. And to reinforce this notion in the public consciousness, royalty had huge pyramids built to house their remains.

Later kings in Europe sought (and were granted by the Pope) religious sanction to rule. Here again, good Christians could not rebel against the representative of God on earth without endangering their immortal soul. This partnership between the Church and the state served both well for centuries.

But after the Reformation and the secularization of Europe, the power and prestige of royalty began to decline, and this trend was accelerated by the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. Replacing the concept of a religiously sanctioned aristocracy was the revival of the ancient Greek concept of democracy: initially restricted to the land-owning class (as it had been in early Greece), the system was expanded to be all-inclusive as it is today.

Deriving their legitimacy from a popular mandate, democratically elected governments needed to make people believe they were taking steps of questionable morality for their own good. To this end, they harnessed the increasingly powerful media, and, behind the scenes, the financial clout of big business and the intellectual resources of academia. Those who resisted this new order were cut off from state patronage in the shape of government contracts, access to those in power and research grants. Above all, the state relied on the enormous gullibility and ignorance of the masses to ensure that the message it was trying to put across was absorbed and accepted.

This is the system that has been in place in advanced democracies over the last century or so. The tools of control have become more refined with the advances in the electronic media, but the nexus described above has been functioning smoothly with the occasional hiccups for many years and delivers the desired consensus at times of crisis. In this war for hearts and minds in countries taking unpopular and unpleasant steps, words and images are the main weapons.

Some words have a weight and a resonance that lingers long after they have been used. Consider 'terrorism' for a moment. The connotation is of an individual who kills and maims innocent people for the sake of some crackpot cause. But if you use 'freedom fighter' or 'partisan' to describe the same individual, he is somehow ennobled although his methods remain the same. The state fighting him uses the 'terrorist' label to demonize him while his supporters see him as a hero.

But this war of words is about more than just semantics. It is about the willingness and ability of the state to twist words to its advantage. In America, the state's task is made much easier by the lack of public interest in world events. For instance, before the recent war on Iraq was launched, a majority of Americans were convinced that somehow Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Those who weren't as gullible accepted the government's claim that his ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction constituted a real and present danger to the world.

This mindset was the result of a long and careful media build-up to the war despite evidence from the UN inspectors that the so-called WMDs constituted no threat at all. Sceptics were not given media time, and carefully vetted 'talking heads' were invited to talk shows time and again to repeat the big lie. Goebbels' lesson had been well learned.

And now that it is pretty much established that there are in fact no WMDs to be found in Iraq, and the American and British people and their representatives had been conned into supporting their governments, the propaganda machines in both countries have been geared towards damage control. In Britain, Tony Blair and his spokesmen are now talking of trying to find 'programmes' to build WMDs rather than finding the weapons themselves.

As the blame and the responsibility for misinforming the public is sought to be shifted from Bush and Blair to their intelligence agencies, advisers on both sides of the Atlantic have taken the offensive. In a masterful stroke of misdirection, Alistair Campbell, Blair's director of communications, has accused the BBC of misinforming its audience.

Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, asks if 'sixteen words' in her boss's State of the Union speech that mentioned Iraq's nuclear ambition were such a big deal. Actually, yes. If those words were a deliberate misrepresentation to obtain the unwitting support of the American people, they are indeed a big deal. But her attitude reflects the lack of respect people in power have for the truth.

Dictatorships and quasi-democracies like Pakistan distort the truth far more crudely. But these states have to contend with an all-pervasive public cynicism that rejects the official version of every event, even if it occasionally happens to be the truth. Since such states have no legitimacy and no accountability, and the media is often controlled, the public sees the government's statements as self-serving, and therefore without credibility. Only when the official line has some public support is it accepted, even though it is blatantly slanted.

Thus, in Pakistan an unsophisticated public swallows anti-Indian propaganda while a gullible Indian audience accepts everything their media says about Pakistanis. Ditto for the Israelis and the Palestinians. Indeed, states confronting each other have an easy time of demonizing their foes as patriotism and nationalism are invoked, and anybody not falling into line is a traitor.

And in war, as we all know to our cost, truth is the first casualty.