[Peace-discuss] Paleocons right again

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The author is a terrible Rightist -- but I defy you to find anyone who's
crying up Kerry and the Democrats and saying anything near as sensible on
the war.  --CGE]

	The Unasked Question
	July 22, 2004
	by Joe Sobran

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

     So said the poet William Blake. His words came 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?

     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.

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