Truth and War

By Crispin Sartwell

Without truth there cannot be freedom or justice, wisdom or tolerance,
courage or compassion.
Barry Goldwater

The possibility of freedom, democracy, and virtue rests on truth.

If you don't know what the situation is, your choice within it is not free.
Deceiving people compromises their freedom, is manipulation, an attempt to
exercise power over people by providing them illusory contexts of choice.

And if you are not free because you don't know the truth about your
situation, your decisions cannot express your character, because you are
only responsible for genuine choices that you freely make. If you act under
duress or deception, your responsibility is diminished.

The question about the Bush administration's public relations buildup to
Iraq is not whether they had some bad intelligence. The picture that is
emerging is this: they decided to go to war almost immediately after 9.11,
in order to achieve political ends. Then they were criminally indifferent to
whether what they were saying was true. They repeated anything that
supported their case and repressed anything that damaged it.

Public support for the war was essential to the decision to prosecute it.

Similar manipulations were key to getting us into the war in Vietnam (the
Gulf of Tonkin incident) and the Spanish-American war (the Maine). In all
three cases, the result of deception was the unjustified expenditure of
human lives.

Goldwater's declaration expresses his rage at the Johnson administration -
and in particular with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, which embroiled us
in war by lies, and with the Nixon administration, operating by secrecy and
covert campaign operations. It was Goldwater whom congressional Republicans
selected to tell Nixon that he ought to resign.

When George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin
Powell decided that achieving their goals was more important that the truth,
they committed a fundamental attack on the freedom and goodness of each of
us and on our democracy. They made us accessories to the killing both of
Iraqis and Americans.

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Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great
American Lives" will be published in the Fall.