September 20, 2002
The vague hope I felt last week that, after the president’s speech to the U.N., we were finally on our way to a sensible approach toward Iraq has evaporate. The administration’s sullen response this week to Iraq’s acceptance of unconditional inspections (dubious though that acceptance was) suggested that the U.N. speech was not a culminating step in a master plan, as some commentators seem to suggest, but rather represented the latest in a series of improvised and fundamentally dishonest steps in support of a predetermined policy. […]There’s that honesty thing again, eating away at a lot of people’s ability to believe anything this Administration says. [02:39 PM]This approach to government97determine a policy, then offer a series of dishonest (or at best half-honest) rationales in support of the predetermined policy97is deeply corrosive in a democracy; it betrays utter disdain for the public. And, as others have observed, this approach has characterized the Bush administration from day one, from the tax cut on down.
The trouble with complete honesty is it can compromise any actions one might wish to take. To play devil's advocate, if Bush knew for certain that Iraq has nukes and also knew where they were, the worst thing he could do, if you're planning to remove them, is say so. But you're still left with the problem of convincing people to take action without the use of the best reasons.
Things are never black and white, and we never know the full picture. (Disclaimer: That last is aimed at the discussion in general and no blogger in particular.)
That's a good point, but I must admit I'm disturbed by Patrick's lower posts from Elton Board—that in truth the inspectors weren't thrown out as Rumsfeld asserts, but were called back. Being up front about chronological facts is important....
Of course, the issue isn't "complete honesty" -- all governments withhold information, including democratic ones. The issue is an ongoing and obvious pattern of evident and, crucially, petty deceitfulness.
Reading summaries of Bush's comments to Congress, today, made me feel extremely depressed.
Excerpts of a soon-to-be-published document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States" sound like an unabashed Republican attempt to declare a "Pax Americana" to Congress and the world.
"International treaties, deterrence, and containment are now obsolete.... Non-proliferation will be replaced with counter-proliferation.... The U.S. will never again permit any nation to challenge its military supremacy.... We will work for a new era of distinctly American Internationalism."
My local newspaper reports that Bush edited the document heavily because "he thought there were sections where we sounded overbearing or arrogant."
I wouldn't even want to speculate about the language of the report before Bush's "tech edit."
What I read today sounded like it could have come directly out of the mouth of Alexander the Great.
The Republican policy makers appear to believe that the rest of the world will have no choice but to cooperate with their declared policy of global government (without local representation) from Washington D.C.
I'm going to watch my taped rerun of the West Wing season finale, now, where the righteous Jeb Bartlet decides (after an appropriate dramatic interval of soul searching and operatic pathos) to authorize the murder of an "immune" Middle-Eastern diplomat who is also a known terrorist. Entertaining theatrical struggle, there, Aaron, but I don't think I'm going to vote for Jeb Bartlett as my dreamworld president in the '02 election, anymore.
Today, Iraq said no to any new UN resolution (http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/21/iraq.un/index.html). That was Colin Powell's last hope for avoiding war. In the conflict between Powell and the Bush administration hawks, Saddam has sided with the hawks.
Daryl, I read that story as saying that Iraq has announced that its current state of cooperation with UN resolutions doesn't cover any new resolutions that are agreed by the UN. I thought the CNN piece was pretty heavily slanted in favour of the Bush administration's position, leaving the impression that any new UN resolutions would simply be the same old ones, only better.
I thought the Globe & Mail coverage, in which this whole issue is summarized as, "A defiant Iraq announced Saturday that Baghdad would reject any new UN resolutions that Mr. Hussein's government believes are unfavourable." 7/8 of the way down the story was more balanced: this announcement is not a big deal or an attempt by the Iraqi government to goad the US.
If many people agree with you that this story is about Iraq picking a fight, then CNN has pulled off a neat trick: spinning a story so that a statement of position about how much is included in a recent statement of cooperation with the UN turns into the foreign government being unreasonably agressive.
Particularly in the face of the recent announcement of "The National Military Strategy for the United States of America," and all the indications that compliance with UN resolutions is irrelevant to the administration's plans to invade Iraq, it's quite a nifty piece of blame shifting and a needless attempt to portray invasion as a foregone conclusion, to boot.
I'm still depressed, here in the paststream of Electrolite, about the hideous nature of the document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States."
Charlie Stross mentioned the document twice, last week: once in reference to its old, unofficial right-wing think tank format (where Gary Farber chided him for dredging up old Halloween scare stuff), and once more upon its current submission to Congress as an official expression of United States foreign policy.
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf)
Read Molly Ivins today (9/25/02). I can't find a URL for this, yet, at the Star-Telegram site, but I'm cheered slightly that an amplified voice in the real-world press is expressing exactly my reaction to the document.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Comments on I suspect Jeff Cooper: