The Unasked Question

July 22, 2004

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

So said the poet William Blake. His words came

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to mind when I read the hawkish British weekly The Economist on whether President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had lied about the Iraqi “threat” that turned out to be nonexistent after the war had already been fought. Both rulers have been cleared of outright mendacity by official investigations; the magazine called them “sincere deceivers” who “believed what they said, but ... said more than they really knew.”

Many people argue that we should believe our rulers because “they know so much more than we do.” Yes, they have access to far more information than we do; and furthermore, they have the power to withhold it from us. A curious reason for trusting them. Jefferson said that freedom depends on “jealousy” — suspicion of government — and not “confidence” in it.

We have more to fear than rulers’ factual lies; we also have to worry about their bad judgment and exaggerations. The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Bush had “overstated” the supposed Iraqi threat. Are we expected to write this off as an honest mistake, when the “overstatement” meant the difference between war and peace, life and death?

While Bush was “overstating” the danger, he allowed his underlings to go further. Vice President Dick Cheney, the administration’s answer to Whoopi Goldberg, said there was “no doubt” that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear program; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned that we faced nuclear attack; even Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only member of the Bush team known for measuring his words, joined in the hyperbole contest, asserting positively things unwarranted by the facts.

Yes, in a sense they all knew more than we did. That’s what makes their feigned certitude not only false, but criminal. They misled the American public into thinking a “preemptive” war was necessary for American survival, when it was not.

Even so, many Americans didn’t believe them. Politicians lie a lot; that’s a fact of life. But in this case, it also defied common sense to think Saddam Hussein would dare to launch an attack on the United States, whose weapons of mass killing were so far superior to anything he could possibly have possessed. He had already been decisively deterred from invading tiny Kuwait next door, which he had once attacked only because he thought it was safe to do so. Why would he launch a suicidal war on the West?

[Breaker quote: How "sincere" were our deceivers?]

[Breaker quote: How "sincere" were our deceivers?]

Moreover, neoconservatives in the press, who hungered for war on Iraq, went beyond exaggeration to sheer fantasy, warning that the United States was in danger of total destruction — “holocaust,” in the word of Richard Perle and David Frum, in their hysterical book An End to Evil. Bush did nothing to temper these diatribes, which were useful to him; just as he didn’t bother correcting the many Americans who didn’t even know the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Such absurd confusion was also useful.

So outright lying was hardly necessary. Just encouraging hysteria and letting it run its natural course did the job. Time and again the Bush spokesmen said there was “no doubt” of the Iraqi threat; and those who did have doubts should trust their rulers. “The risks of inaction,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “are greater than the risks of action.” War was the prudent course.

The country is now having severe second thoughts about the war, but one risk was hardly taken into account: the risk of killing innocent people, including Iraqi soldiers whose only crime was trying vainly to defend their country from an unprovoked invasion. We still hear a great deal about American casualties, but almost nothing about American guilt.

An unjustified war is mass murder. That obvious truth has carried very little weight in the whole debate over this war. Our government has slaughtered countless people. Those who still resist are called rebels and even terrorists, no different from the fanatics of 9/11.

The hawks, within the administration and in its volunteer propaganda corps in the media, have never evinced much (if any) regret at the cost to the other side. How can anyone call these deceivers “sincere” if they never even paused to face the simple moral question “But what if we are wrong?” If they had been sincere then, they would be facing this question today, tens of thousands of deaths later, when there is little doubt how wrong they were.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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