High Crimes

By Crispin Sartwell

In England, the question of how Tony Blair & co. justified war threatens to bring down his government. The Blair administration not only purveyed the sketchy rumor of uranium shipments from Niger to Saddam, supported by crudely forged documents, but flatly asserted that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, a false claim for which they had no reasonable evidence. The death - apparently by suicide - of a scientist who told the BBC that the information was "sexed up" in order to lead England into war has brought the matter to a crisis.

Here in the US, things have not reached quite that degree of seriousness, in part because the Bush administration used Blair as its point man in making the case for war. But the matter is of the utmost seriousness, and as the information emerges, resignation or impeachment should not be out of the question.

By the time Bill Clinton was impeached, it was obvious that he had the sexual mores of a tomcat and had lied about it. But he should never have been impeached: his actions were disgusting, but they were not fundamental attacks on democracy or the legitimacy of the American state.

If, on the other hand, it turns out that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell started us killing Iraqis and Iraqis killing us by a systematic distortion of intelligence, they have instituted government by lies and many, many people have paid with their lives. That is an abrogation of democracy, a fundamental violation of their responsibility to the people of this nation.

It seems to me that roughly what happened is this: the Bush administration decided - perhaps, according to published reports, on September 11, 2001 - that they would invade Iraq. The connection of Iraq to the terrorist attacks was sketchy, at best: the terrorists were Arabs and so was Saddam. But Saddam was a symbol of the failings of the first Bush administration, and precisely because he didn't present a serious chemical, biological, or nuclear threat by that point, a military victory would be relatively easy and would renew a humiliated nation's pride.

(If you don't think Saddam's weakness was a factor, consider how different is our response to North Korea, with regard to which there is actual and not fictional evidence of nuclear activity, along with massive human rights violations: we're handling the matter with extreme delicacy.)

The Bush administration then resolved to repeat every rumor - no matter how baldly ridiculous - that justified the attack, and to repress all information that made the other way. They pressured everyone - intelligence agencies, weapons inspectors, Iraqi dissidents - to exaggerate the threat. The build-up to the war involved military maneuvering, but above all it involved a long-drawn-out disinformation campaign designed to secure allies and public opinion.

It is not the war itself that is proving to be the domestic crisis, but the disinformation that brought us to it. And that is the right result.

If you can control what people believe, you can control what they do. The Bush administration managed to manufacture a consensus for war by distorting the context of public opinion, so that the American people did not precisely understand what they were being asked to kill and die for. It has happened before, when President Johnson manufactured an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify greater war powers in Vietnam, and then prosecuted that conflict in a poisonous atmosphere of lies. The war ended Johnson's presidency.

Lying about matters of state to manipulate the citizenry makes democracy impossible: you don't know what you're voting for, or against. If the matter is war, lying is murder.

By comparison, oral sex in the Oval Office appears downright wholesome.

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Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" will be published this Fall by the State University of New York Press.