I’ve been looking for a suitable quote to anchor this column about truth, lies and the Information Ministry of Iraq.

Problem is, I’ve got so many to choose from. Like California Gov. Hiram Johnson’s famous admonition that, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Or Winston Churchill’s observation that, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

But it occurs to me that the flavor of Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf’s press briefings is probably best captured by an old Richard Pryor line about a brazen man caught cheating by his wife. The man swears he wasn’t cheating at all.

“Who you going to believe?” he demands. “Me, or your lying eyes?”

Similarly, Sahhaf told reporters recently that American forces “are not even (within) 100 miles,” even as U.S. troops were seizing Saddam International Airport, 12 miles outside of Baghdad. “They are not near Baghdad!” said Sahhaf. “Don’t believe them.”

One is reminded of the Wizard of Oz crying out to Dorothy and friends, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” For those of us who have been following the minister’s briefings, it was another virtuoso performance. Sahhaf has continued to deny American military success even as evidence of that success becomes too near and, you’d think, too obvious, to ignore. He will probably still be swearing U.S. forces are nowhere near Baghdad on the day he is taken away at gunpoint.

Certainly, there’s nothing surprising in Sahhaf’s less-than-intimate relationship with truth. Still, it offers a telling window into the mindset of the regime he represents. In Iraq, evidently, people are conditioned to believe a thing because the government tells them to. In Iraq, the obvious and the apparent are secondary to what Saddam and his functionaries say. In Iraq, if you are given a choice between the government and your lying eyes, you’d better curse your lying eyes.

Again, this is not uncommon for your average dictatorship. Still, Sahhaf’s fresh demonstration that denial is more than a river in Egypt comes against a fascinating backdrop. Meaning the ongoing debate over how we should regard this war.

Reams have been written and many broadcast hours used in analyzing the various biases and prisms through which this affair is viewed. American media have been accused of cheerleading, the BBC of being too sharply critical. Record numbers of us have turned to al-Jazeera and other Arab news Web sites, in search of a different perspective than we will find on CBS, CNN or the pages of The New York Times.

This is a healthy thing. It is, in the purest sense, a search for truth. Or, perhaps more to the point, a recognition that truth – especially in as fluid and chaotic an enterprise as war – is often a subjective thing. It’s a diamond with many facets. What you see depends on where you stand.

We are all prisoners of our own perceptions, all live in boxes constructed of our own backgrounds, beliefs, values and aspirations. And once you understand that, it only makes sense to try to get beyond that, seek to understand what they are thinking in those boxes on the other side.

Information is a weapon in time of war, a means of encouraging or demoralizing both soldiers and civilian populations. It’s called propaganda and that’s what Baghdad is engaged in. Quiet as it’s kept, Washington is, too. You and I are the prize in a battle for hearts and minds.

That’s what makes the search for truth difficult. It’s also what makes it important.

In all likelihood, though, the truth we seek – to the degree it is knowable at all – probably won’t be found until years after this business is completed. But thanks to Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, there’s one thing, right now, that we can say for sure.

We may not know where the truth is, but we definitely know where it is not.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is: [email protected].