As May ended, the big news on the talk shows was the book written by President Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan. It was labeled a "tell-all book" in which McClellan said he took part in "deception" about the Iraq War in obedience to the White House. Now McClellan calls this war "a strategic blunder."

McClellan's book, "What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," generated a heated response from both pro-war and anti-war people. Most of the White House people he once worked with were very vocal as they "excommunicated" him, to use the word reported in The New York Times.

But I wonder why people are so surprised about war and deception. Don't they know that "international war is a monster born of hypocrisy, fed on falsehood, fattened on humbug ... directed to the death and torture of millions.... (It is) degrading to humanity, endangering civilians and bringing forth in its travail a hideous brood of strife, conflict and war, more war."

Those aren't my words. They were written in 1928 by statesman Arthur Ponsonby in a book he titled "Falsehood in Wartime" (E. P. Dutton & Co.). He begins by quoting Sophocles: "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty."

I came across "Falsehood in Wartime" the summer before the infamous Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. I was doing research on World War I after an editor at Facts on File asked me if I wanted to expand a book my late son Peter had written on that war. To keep Peter's name on the book, I said yes.

It was strictly by accident that Ponsonby's book fell into my hands at a book sale. His book was about "lies circulated throughout the nations during the Great War" of 1914 to 1918, as World War I came to be called. Now I had in my hands an account that echoes my sentiments about the Iraq War: Ponsonby wrote that nations were "fooled into war."

After hearing about McClellan's book, I reread what Ponsonby wrote so many years ago. Still digesting the fallout from World War I, he wanted people to know that "a government which has decided on embarking on the hazardous and terrible enterprise of war must at the outset present a one-sided case in justification of its action, and cannot afford to admit in any particular whatever the smallest degree of right or reason on the part of the people it has made up its mind to fight.

"Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed and a picture presented which by its crude coloring will persuade the ignorant people that their government is blameless, their cause is righteous and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy has been proved beyond question."

Reading these words again, what flashed through my mind were other phrases born to justify 21st-century war: "weapons of mass destruction," "vicious, cruel dictator," "bringing democracy to Iraq" and "freedom for the people."

Rather than present my own comment on these, I'll again quote Ponsonby: "The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in wartime in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned." Indeed.

Now, says The New York Times, we have McClellan, "who bluntly accuses Mr. Bush of misleading the nation into war, though he says the biggest mistake the White House made was 'a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.'"

God help us. We never learn from war!

Antoinette Bosco is an author and columnist with Catholic News Service.