{"id":198,"date":"2005-08-02T00:26:54","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T05:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=198"},"modified":"2005-08-02T02:16:39","modified_gmt":"2005-08-02T07:16:39","slug":"the-bush-lied-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=198","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;Bush Lied&#8221; lie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s entry in the <a href='http:\/\/www.belgraviadispatch.com\/archives\/004689.html'>Belgravia Dispatch<\/a><br \/>\ndoes an excellent job of demolishing the &#8220;Bush lied, people died!&#8221;<br \/>\ncanard so popular among the anti-war left &mdash; Greg Djerejian<br \/>\nechoes my own conclusions when he writes: &#8220;But if you dig into the<br \/>\nweeds of the investigations that have taken place &#8212; one must<br \/>\njudiciously conclude that he didn&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But let&#8217;s suppose that George W. Bush had in fact lied about Iraqi<br \/>\nWMD during that State of the Union address.  I long ago concluded that<br \/>\nI would not care if he had lied.  To see why, let&#8217;s try looking at this from<br \/>\nGeorge Bush&#8217;s (simulated) point of view&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Imagine you are the President of the United States in 2002.  You<br \/>\nknow that the country with the world&#8217;s fourth-largest army is sitting<br \/>\nwithin theater-missile range of every oilfield in the Mideast, and<br \/>\nit&#8217;s run by psychopathic thug who nerve-gassed his own people in 1980<br \/>\nand has been shipping money and guns to anti-American terrorist groups<br \/>\never since.  The thug has stated his intention to destroy the U.S. and<br \/>\ntried to assassinate a U.S. president.  Even without the reports that<br \/>\nofficers of his Mukhbarat have been training Al-Qaeda affiliates in<br \/>\nchemical-weapons techniques, you have to take him out because he is a<br \/>\nserious threat to the U.S.&#8217;s national interests.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, you have a problem.  A lot of elite opinion in your<br \/>\ncountry is allergic to the notion that the U.S. <em>has<\/em> national<br \/>\ninterests.  For example, you used to be in the oil business; you know<br \/>\nthat if there is any serious interruption of Mideast oil supplies the<br \/>\nU.S. economy will crash hard enough to make the Great Depression look<br \/>\nlike a Sunday-school picnic. But American politics has become so<br \/>\ndetached from reality that it is impossible for you to speak the plain<br \/>\ntruth &mdash; that the U.S., must, as a consequence, be prepared to go<br \/>\nto war to keep the oil flowing.  If you say this, you will be<br \/>\npilloried as a neo-imperialist by many of the people most likely to<br \/>\nfreeze or starve or die in riots if you don&#8217;t stave off an oil<br \/>\ncrash.  And <em>they<\/em> call <em>you<\/em> an idiot!<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re not actually planning to go to war over the oil, though that<br \/>\nremains the long-term reason that keeping murderous anti-American<br \/>\nnutballs out of power in the region is important.  You&#8217;re much more<br \/>\nconcerned about Hussein forging closer links to the international<br \/>\nterror network &mdash; you know it&#8217;s been looking for a new patron<br \/>\never since the Soviet Union folded up, and occasional Iraqi<br \/>\ncollaboration with al-Qaeda could turn into a full-blown alliance at<br \/>\nany time.  You have to take out either Hussein&#8217;s regime or al-Qaeda<br \/>\nbefore that happens, and Iraq is the more visible target.<\/p>\n<p>Your options are limited by the intensity with which the Democrats<br \/>\nare pursuing a vendetta against you (they never got over their failure<br \/>\nto steal the 2000 presidential election). Bill Clinton may have been a<br \/>\npathological liar with a unhealthy yen for overweight interns, but he<br \/>\ngrasped the danger and was willing to say so in public.  His<br \/>\nsuccessors have tossed everything that he and they used to know about<br \/>\nthe Iraq\/terrorism connection down the memory hole.  You think they&#8217;re<br \/>\ncontemptible frauds, throwing over the security of the U.S. in order<br \/>\nto score partisan points &mdash; but they have so many willing<br \/>\nwater-carriers in the national media that you can&#8217;t sell<br \/>\nanti-terrorism as a casus belli any more than you could sell<br \/>\nprotecting our oil supply.<\/p>\n<p>You need a casus belli that the American people will buy.  Your<br \/>\ndomestic opponents, by repeatedly and loudly lying through their<br \/>\nteeth, have managed to turn any talk of the two soundest reasons for<br \/>\ngoing to war into a political non-starter. What are you going to<br \/>\ndo?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Under those circumstances, I&#8217;d say a fib or two about African<br \/>\nuranium would have been pretty forgivable.  But I don&#8217;t think it was<br \/>\nBush that played games with the truth.  Rather it&#8217;s his opponents who<br \/>\nhave been relentlessly promulgating a series of Big Lies &mdash; and<br \/>\nthat they never knew of or believed in an Iraq\/al-Qaeda connection is<br \/>\nthe least of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch does an excellent job of demolishing the &#8220;Bush lied, people died!&#8221; canard so popular among the anti-war left &mdash; Greg Djerejian echoes my own conclusions when he writes: &#8220;But if you dig into the weeds of the investigations that have taken place &#8212; one must judiciously conclude that he&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=198\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The &#8220;Bush Lied&#8221; lie<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}