[Peace-discuss] Did Bush lie? (and abortion in the UK).

[Morton K.Brussel]

Some thoughts while trying to get through accumulated email (1100 
messages):

Hate to argue with the revered Chomsky, but I don't believe that Bush 
(and cohort) is the equivalent of a 3 year old, nor even an 
Alsheimers-affected Reagan. I believe that he knew what he was doing 
when "miss-stating the facts" and his intentions (for Democracy, etc.), 
repeatedly, even when members of his own administration admitted the 
contrary to what he was saying.

To consider Bush as a moron is to let him off the hook.  I don't 
believe we should do that. Saying he doesn't know better would also 
remove from him responsibility for outrages on Iraq, etc. .

Another comment relative to the obsessional abortion issue: To use the 
word "children" for fetuses aborted seems gratuitously predjudicial. Of 
course, we've been through all that, as I've sought to explicate 
previously, to little effect, evidently.

MKB


On Jun 1, 2004, at 9:23 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [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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