[Peace-discuss] Did Bush lie?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[An answer from Noam Chomsky to a question posed to him.  --CGE]

Did Bush lie on the reasons for 9-11 ("they hate our freedoms," etc.)? I
think one has to be a bit cautious.

Lying requires a certain competence: at least, it requires an
understanding of the difference between truth and falsehood. When a 3-year
old tells you an obvious falsehood, it isn't really fair to call it a lie.
The same was true of the huge whoppers that Reagan came out with when he
got out of the control of his handlers. The poor soul probably had no
idea. With Bush, I suspect it is more or less the same. There is a
literature of "exposures" (Woodward, etc.), which is taken seriously, but
I don't frankly understand why. Among the people he is interviewing, some
have the competence to lie, and it only makes sense to suppose that they
are doing so; why should they tell him the truth? As for the others, it
doesn't really matter what they tell him. The same is true of people who
are deeply immersed in some religious cult, like the Washington neocon
intellectuals. It is hard to know whether they have the competence to lie,
just as it's hard to know for someone who has a direct line to some
divinity.

For people who tried to be serious and honest commentators, the answers to
"why they hate us" have been easy to find all along, and it is rather
striking to see the systematic avoidance (what anthropologists sometimes
call "ritual avoidance") of the clearest evidence. I've often reviewed it
in print -- in World Orders, for example, when the documents were
declassified. In brief, Eisenhower and his staff were concerned in the
1950s about the "campaign of hatred" against us in the Arab world, and
understood the reasons: the perception that the US supports harsh and
oppressive regimes and blocks democracy and development, and does so to
gain control of the energy resources of the region. In later years, that
remained true, though new reasons arose. Thus when the Wall St. Journal
and others studied attitudes of "moneyed Muslims" (bankers, managers of
multinationals, corporate lawyers, etc.) after 9-11, they found the same
reasons, along with others: the decisive US support for vicious Israeli
repression of Palestinians and robbery of their resources, and the
murderous US-UK sanctions that were devastating the civilian society of
Iraq. In the streets and villages, the attitudes would be far more
extreme. Since Western intellectuals don't like to hear unpleasant truths
about themselves, not surprisingly, we are treated instead to a stream of
fantasies about "why they hate us".

It remains true.

Take Iraq. Among Western intellectuals, it is a virtual axiom that the US
goal -- sometimes Bush's "messianic mission," as the elite press puts it
-- is to bring democracy to Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. Critics
in the liberal press (e.g., the New York Review, American Prospect, etc.)
agree that it is a noble and generous vision but object that it is beyond
our reach, etc. Iraqis apparently see it differently. A few days after the
President affirmed his noble vision to rapturous applause in Washington
last November, a poll in Baghdad was released in which people were asked
why the US invaded. Some did agree with near-unanimous Western elite
opinion: to establish democracy -- 1%. 5% said it was to help Iraqis. Most
of the rest gave the obvious answer, dismissed with some hysteria here as
a "conspiracy theory" or with some other intellectual equivalent of a
four-letter word: to control Iraq's resources and to reorganize the Middle
East in the interests of the US and its Israeli client.

Furthermore, it is not just Arabs and Muslims. The reason why many
crucially important polls are simply suppressed in the media is that they
tell us too much that it's better not to know. Take, say, the bombing of
Afghanistan -- a "no brainer" according to virtually unanimous articulate
opinion in the US and UK. No one but lunatics or absolute pacifists could
possibly oppose it, we are solemnly instructed by leading moral
philosophers, the executive editor of the NY Times, and others. To uphold
that stand, it was necessary to suppress an international Gallup poll
taken right after the announcement of the bombing, which found very
limited support for it, and in the region that knows US power best, Latin
America, virtually none. Thus 2% in Mexico supported the bombing IF it
would not hit civilian targets (of course it did, at once) and IF the
perpetrators of 9-11 were known (eight months later, the FBI conceded that
there was still nothing more than "belief" that the plot might have been
hatched in Afghanistan, but carried out elsewhere). Removing
qualifications, there was virtually no support anywhere. But that won't
do, so it is silenced, to this day. And the same is true of "why do they
hate us."

Same elsewhere. I happened to be listening to NPR a few days ago, where
the usual mellifluous voices were discussing how Moqtada al-Sadr is a
marginal figure greatly disliked by Iraqis. Maybe. However, I had just
read a report in the quite respectable London Financial Times of a poll
they regarded as quite credible, taken before the revelations about
torture, which found that the US attack on Moqtada had succeeded in
turning him into the second most popular figure in Iraq, right below Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, with about 1/3 expressing "strong support" for him
and another third "some support." The reasons were that he had at least
stood up to the hated occupation. Maybe it's been published here. I didn't
see it.

However, I'd be reluctant to call what you describe "lies," for the
reasons mentioned, which extend over a broad range, not just to 3-year
olds, cultists, and poor souls whose knowledge of the world may be
restricted pretty much to their note cards.

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