Please

By Crispin Sartwell

If you seriously believed the Bush administration that Iraq posed an immediate threat because of its weapons programs, or that Saddam was intimately connected with al Qaeda, you richly deserved your deception. And if you lived through any part of the twentieth century and didn't learn that political power, and in particular the American presidency, is shrouded in lies - uses lies as a basic strategy for governance - then you really are a chump.

You've got to understand, first of all, that "intelligence" works both ways around: information drives policy, and policy drives disinformation. If the CIA is charged with justifying a certain policy, they'll at least give it a shot. After all, they're loyal Americans.

But the case was luridly bad from the get-go: riddled with holes that were obvious to anyone who was watching. We kept reaching for crudely forged documents and aluminum tubes. When Colin Powell got up in front of the UN to make the case that Saddam was connected to bin Laden, he used as his main point the existence of an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq. The camp was in the Kurdish autonomous zone, controlled not by Saddam but by the people to whom we had allied ourselves. That would have justified bombing DC, but not Baghdad.

Hans Blix has charged not only that he and other weapons inspectors were pressured to distort their reports, but that the Pentagon launched a campaign to discredit him, by impugning, among others things, his heterosexuality.

Call these lies. You should. At a minimum, Rice, Powell, Bush, and Rumsfeld did not care at all whether what they were saying is true, as long as it could move us toward what they wanted. Public opinion helped drive the war, and they were trying to manipulate it, baldly, shamelessly, obviously.

The truth is, we wanted to flex our muscles, wanted to kill somebody, thirsted for conquest. That's the reason they ladled up the slop, and that's the reason you purported to believe them, or decided not to worry too much about the case.

So for God's sake please don't pretend now to feel betrayed or to be anguished by sudden doubt. Your self-deception is as much to blame than their lies.