We Already Know the Administration Was Lying

I found Bob Murphy's recent piece on LewRockwell.com to be an excellent analysis of the recent controversy as to whether the Bush administration was guilty of inflating the threat Saddam Hussein presented to the US. However, I felt that the conclusion understated the actual case against Bush. Murphy wrote: "Until weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and have been verified by independent experts, the US invasion remains immoral and illegal, on the very criteria President Bush himself laid out for it."

This implies that should the US find weapons of mass destruction (henceforth, WMDs), then Bush is off the hook for lying to us on this issue. But I believe that we already can conclude the administration was lying, whether or not any WMDs or documents proving there were WMDs eventually are unearthed. (Like Murphy, I don't pretend to have any deep knowledge of Iraq's military programs over the last decade. It would neither shock me if it really had developed some very deadly weapons, nor if it had not. I am an "Iraq WMD agnostic." However, I do think it is difficult to explain why, if Hussein would not destroy his WMDs to avert war, he would suddenly destroy them right when they would actually be of use to him.)

But I say we can already conclude we were sold a bill of goods because the Bush administration did not say that it was likely that Iraq had WMDs, that it had pretty good evidence that Iraq had them, or that it sincerely believed it had them. No, it claimed, on numerous occasions, that it was sure that Iraq had such weapons and that it had conclusive evidence to that effect. Why, it even knew exactly where those weapons were. (For some examples of the administration's "certainty" about its claims, see "A Campaign of Mass Deception" by Bill Press.)

It is those claims by the administration that I believe have been exposed as lies. It may very well be that administration officials sincerely believed that Hussein possessed or was developing WMDs. They may have honestly thought that it was in the best interest of Americans' safety to initiate "regime change" as soon as possible. But they did not present their case in terms of belief and likelihood. They presented it in terms of certainty. And in doing so, they were lying. They may have even felt that such exaggerations were justified because they believed that the threat Iraq presented was so grave, but that does not change the fact that they were lies.

Here is Murphy quoting a weapons inspector currently operating in Iraq:

The Pentagon’s chief weapons prober said he didn’t want to go public with details of his find until the case is an indisputable lock. "I know if we can’t explain the WMD program of Iraq we lose credibility with regard to other states like Iran, Syria and North Korea," he told NBC.

How long will it take before President Bush is able to reveal what could be smoking-gun justification of his decision to make war on Iraq?

"I think we will have a substantial body of evidence before six months," Kay told NBC.

Note the incongruity between statements the administration made this past winter and these recent comments by Kay. Six months ago, the administration didn't need time to make their case "an indisputable lock." It already was an indisputable lock. They didn't need six months to accumulate "a substantial body of evidence." They already had conclusive evidence.

At the time the Bush administration was proclaiming to the world that they "knew" that Iraq had WMDs, the explanation for why they couldn't present their evidence to the public was that it would compromise their sources. If Saddam saw piece of evidence X, he would know that Abdul in WMD receivables had betrayed him and Saddam would have Abdul killed. The US would both lose a source and be responsible for the source's early demise.

But Saddam is not in power now. The US controls Iraq. Granted, a few of our sources might still be acting as double agents inside the Iraqi resistance. But is every last one of them? Isn't there a single fellow who is willing to have his cover blown in exchange for a new identity and a nice house and pension in Utah? Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to provide him with that and then present his incontrovertible evidence than to employ scores of military personnel, for many months, trying to dig up new incontrovertible evidence that we can reveal?

I think it is important to be fair to those one criticizes, so I want to consider two scenarios that might excuse those who claimed certainty about Iraq's WMDs. First of all, it is quite possible for someone to be "certain" about something, in a subjective sense, only to later discover that he was wrong. Most of us have probably had the experience of having been "certain" that we had an appointment at ten, only to show up at ten and discover that it really had been for nine. When this happens, an honest person expresses his bewilderment and apologizes: "I was sure Joe's phone number was 544-8657, but to my amazement it turns out I was wrong!"

But that is not what the Bush administration is doing. No one is saying, "My God, our evidence appeared to us to be airtight, but now we wonder if it was." Instead, they are adopting the somewhat absurd posture, "We really did have conclusive evidence, and, if you can give us just another six months, we'll be able to find some of it."

It is also possible to find oneself in a situation where it seems that deception is the most ethical course at the time. (I don't believe that ethical precepts are "all relative," but rather that they all must be balanced against other ethical precepts. Murder is wrong, but so is disobeying God: therefore Abraham found himself reluctantly bringing Isaac to the sacrificial altar.) A person who realizes that her friend is far too drunk to drive or to reason with may decide that the best thing to do is to hide the friend's keys and lie about their whereabouts. But an honest person will regard this as only a temporary necessity. The next morning, when her friend has sobered up, she will say, "Fred, I felt I had to hide your keys, because I thought if you drove there was a good chance that you'd kill yourself or someone else. I'm sorry to have lied to you, but I couldn't see what else to do."

The Bush administration is not doing that either. Someone who is basically honest, but who finds special circumstances ethically require dishonesty, will want to rectify the situation as soon as possible. If the war advocates in our government felt that circumstances made exaggeration the ethical course last winter, but that honesty with the American people is generally the best policy, then today they would be attempting to explain why their hands were forced. And they would do so whatever the consequences for their careers might be. To continue to lie to save one's position is no longer a white lie told in the interest of those being deceived, but a quite ordinary black lie told to advance one's own interests.

I have a tentative hypothesis as to the actual mindset of the people, operating both inside and outside the US government, who were the driving force for the war against Iraq. Although I am prepared to modify my view as more evidence comes to light, it strikes me as plausible enough to be worth presenting in public.

These people, whom we could broadly term "neoconservatives," have a Hegelian view of history. To them, human history has a goal apart from the myriad of goals pursued by individual humans. They differ from earlier Hegelians as to what this goal is. As they see it, history's apotheosis is not the early 19^th-century Prussian state, as it was for Hegel, nor worldwide communism, as it was for Marx and Engels. Instead, the end state history is struggling toward is the democratic welfare state with a government-managed market economy. In their role, as the equivalent of the "vanguard of the proletariat" in Marxism, it is incumbent upon them to advance history's cause in whatever way they can.

A man like Saddam Hussein, who resists this historical inevitability, holds the same place in their worldview as a "reactionary bourgeois" did in the thought of Marx and Engels. Such people must be eliminated, as they are the epitome of evil in the world. (In describing their views in this way, I don't mean to imply that Hussein wasn't evil or that he was just a kindly old dictator with a bushy moustache.) Whatever tactics one must use to clear such recalcitrant individuals out of history's path are justified. Given the place held by such people in their worldview, many neoconservatives probably sincerely believed that Hussein must be engaged in the most nefarious of activities, including providing every Moslem terrorist he could find with packages of anthrax and suitcase nukes.

Furthermore, given that they see themselves as history's midwives, it was their duty to forward the project of war against Iraq by whatever means seemed most likely to work. Hussein was probably developing a bomb that would target only endangered species, eating babies for breakfast, and making plans to abscond with Jennifer Lopez once he subdued the US. Whatever charges could be brought against him were most likely true, so the issue was only to find the charges that would best convince the American public that war was justified.

My hypothesis about the neoconservative mindset in the months leading up to the war helps answer a question put to critics by some defenders of the Bush administration: Why, they ask, if the advocates of war believed that Iraq had no WMDs, would they have forwarded a charge they knew would be proven false once the war ended? However, if their mindset was similar to the one I describe above, then I find it quite plausible that they really did think that Hussein must have been planning all sorts of nastiness for the US. The problem, in terms of ethical government, is not that they didn't really believe it, but that they were willing to present their beliefs as certainties.

Of course, if one accepts the neoconservative view of history, even this was not really an ethical lapse. Hussein was a reactionary who had to be removed from power, whatever the American people thought of the project and whatever prevarication had to be employed to achieve that goal. This, I think, is the reality that opponents of the War Party must strive to make apparent to the American people. We are being governed by members of a messianic sect who believe that they are directly connected to the thoughts of Geist* as it moves history forward. Their role, as they see it, is not to implement a foreign policy in keeping with the wishes of the American people, but to persuade, trick, or force the American people to support the foreign policy that Geist has whispered into the ears of its elect, the neoconservatives.

If we can succeed in driving this point home, I think the high summer of the neoconservatives will be turning quickly to autumn.

* Geist is Hegel's term for the "World Spirit" directing history.