Rational Grounds

One of the stickiest problems in trying to pin down whether the Administration lied to us in the run-up to the war is the sort of hallowed (or un-hallowed, as it were) aura the term "lie" has taken on when you're talking about politics. For instance, Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union speech that

"the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

isn't exactly a lie, because he's not saying that he learned this, or even that he necessarily believes it. He's just saying, you know? Of course, we all know what the line is supposed to mean, and what we're supposed to take from it. So sure, it's not a lie, but he's lying by implication, right?

Except, what did he know at that point, really? Wasn't there a lot of disagreement on this?

The complex layers of intelligence vetting and speech writing create an almost impenetrable wall of plausible deniability around the President these days - he can say just about anything, and, if it's wrong, blame it on the people feeding him the words. And as we've seen, the Administration, when called out on this claim later, blamed variously the speech writers, the speech vetters, the intelligence community, and the British Government. They know what a powerful charge "lying" is in the political arena, and they have taken great pains to insulate themselves from that charge.

But that particular episode (and others like it) aside, didn't the whole international community agree that Saddam probably had WMDs? Wasn't there a broad consensus within our intelligence community that this was the case?

That is certainly what we were led to believe at the time. But as subsequent revelations have shown, that was not the most accurate picture either. The public accounts of intelligence findings were consistently airbrushed to provide the most convincing case for going to war possible.

Okay, fine, there was dissent, but don't you have to make a decision at some point in the real world? We always have to make political decisions without the full picture, and we had to take account of the worst case scenario because the consequences were so huge. And in that event, to secure public support for such an endeavor, you have to give them your best pitch. History is replete with examples of this - if Iraq had worked, would we view the Bush Administration as liars or courageous statesmen picking the least bad option?

This assumes that the Bush Administration legitimately believed their own story in the first place. Admittedly, that's a virtually unanswerable question; at the end of the day, the only person who know's Bush's mind is Bush. But we can try and make reasonable inferences based on past behavior, subsequent behavior, and the political tactics and strategies of the actors involved. They don't paint a pretty picture:

• "A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001. The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff)." (Sunday Herald)
• "CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." (CBS)
• "[Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." (the Downing Street Memo)
• "During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, [Bush] made it clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times. [...] "The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Manning wrote, paraphrasing Bush. "This was when the bombing would begin." (International Herald Tribune)

So, no, this doesn't sound like they were reluctantly forced to a conclusion here.

Now, again, great care has been taken to insulate the Administation from charges of lying even in the face of what amounts to a massive fraud upon the American public. We may yet scare up some quotes where they did go over that technical line and actually lie (and maybe we'll have a Congress willing to prosecute on that basis) but until then what we're dealing with here is Bullshit. In his cult-famous book, On Bullshit, author Harry Frankfurt describes the eponymous subject:

But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

I think he overstates the case above: I would argue that the bullshitter does indeed care about whether his statements are true or false; they would love for them to be true. But ultimately they can't or won't be bothered to make sure of that, and therein lies their sin.

One could, if they were feeling charitable, even grant the Administration the benefit of the doubt on their own internal belief-state. Maybe they really bought their own hype, and earnestly believed that Saddam had these weapons and was days or weeks away from giving Al Qaeda a tac-nuke. Surely, there were some true believers involved who really did think that. But even in this case, one must hold them accountable for the falsity of their claims. As I've blogged before:

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.