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