The &#8220;Bush Lied&#8221; lie
<p>Today&#8217;s entry in the <a href='http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004689.html'>Belgravia Dispatch</a><br />
does an excellent job of demolishing the &#8220;Bush lied, people died!&#8221;<br />
canard so popular among the anti-war left &mdash; Greg Djerejian<br />
echoes my own conclusions when he writes: &#8220;But if you dig into the<br />
weeds of the investigations that have taken place &#8212; one must<br />
judiciously conclude that he didn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
<p>But let&#8217;s suppose that George W. Bush had in fact lied about Iraqi<br />
WMD during that State of the Union address.  I long ago concluded that<br />
I would not care if he had lied.  To see why, let&#8217;s try looking at this from<br />
George Bush&#8217;s (simulated) point of view&#8230;</p>
<p><span id="more-198"></span></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Imagine you are the President of the United States in 2002.  You<br />
know that the country with the world&#8217;s fourth-largest army is sitting<br />
within theater-missile range of every oilfield in the Mideast, and<br />
it&#8217;s run by psychopathic thug who nerve-gassed his own people in 1980<br />
and has been shipping money and guns to anti-American terrorist groups<br />
ever since.  The thug has stated his intention to destroy the U.S. and<br />
tried to assassinate a U.S. president.  Even without the reports that<br />
officers of his Mukhbarat have been training Al-Qaeda affiliates in<br />
chemical-weapons techniques, you have to take him out because he is a<br />
serious threat to the U.S.&#8217;s national interests.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, you have a problem.  A lot of elite opinion in your<br />
country is allergic to the notion that the U.S. <em>has</em> national<br />
interests.  For example, you used to be in the oil business; you know<br />
that if there is any serious interruption of Mideast oil supplies the<br />
U.S. economy will crash hard enough to make the Great Depression look<br />
like a Sunday-school picnic. But American politics has become so<br />
detached from reality that it is impossible for you to speak the plain<br />
truth &mdash; that the U.S., must, as a consequence, be prepared to go<br />
to war to keep the oil flowing.  If you say this, you will be<br />
pilloried as a neo-imperialist by many of the people most likely to<br />
freeze or starve or die in riots if you don&#8217;t stave off an oil<br />
crash.  And <em>they</em> call <em>you</em> an idiot!</p>
<p>You&#8217;re not actually planning to go to war over the oil, though that<br />
remains the long-term reason that keeping murderous anti-American<br />
nutballs out of power in the region is important.  You&#8217;re much more<br />
concerned about Hussein forging closer links to the international<br />
terror network &mdash; you know it&#8217;s been looking for a new patron<br />
ever since the Soviet Union folded up, and occasional Iraqi<br />
collaboration with al-Qaeda could turn into a full-blown alliance at<br />
any time.  You have to take out either Hussein&#8217;s regime or al-Qaeda<br />
before that happens, and Iraq is the more visible target.</p>
<p>Your options are limited by the intensity with which the Democrats<br />
are pursuing a vendetta against you (they never got over their failure<br />
to steal the 2000 presidential election). Bill Clinton may have been a<br />
pathological liar with a unhealthy yen for overweight interns, but he<br />
grasped the danger and was willing to say so in public.  His<br />
successors have tossed everything that he and they used to know about<br />
the Iraq/terrorism connection down the memory hole.  You think they&#8217;re<br />
contemptible frauds, throwing over the security of the U.S. in order<br />
to score partisan points &mdash; but they have so many willing<br />
water-carriers in the national media that you can&#8217;t sell<br />
anti-terrorism as a casus belli any more than you could sell<br />
protecting our oil supply.</p>
<p>You need a casus belli that the American people will buy.  Your<br />
domestic opponents, by repeatedly and loudly lying through their<br />
teeth, have managed to turn any talk of the two soundest reasons for<br />
going to war into a political non-starter. What are you going to<br />
do?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Under those circumstances, I&#8217;d say a fib or two about African<br />
uranium would have been pretty forgivable.  But I don&#8217;t think it was<br />
Bush that played games with the truth.  Rather it&#8217;s his opponents who<br />
have been relentlessly promulgating a series of Big Lies &mdash; and<br />
that they never knew of or believed in an Iraq/al-Qaeda connection is<br />
the least of them.</p>
