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Lying has always been part of politics. Traditionally, however, the lie was seen as a necessary evil that those in power should keep from their subjects. Even totalitarians tried to hide the brutal truths on which their regimes rested. This disparity gave critics and reformers their sense of purpose: to illuminate for citizens the difference between the way the world appeared and the way it actually functioned. Following the proclamation of victory in the Iraqi war, however, that sense of purpose became imperiled, along with the trust necessary for maintaining a democratic discourse. The Bush administration boldly proclaimed the legitimacy of the lie, the irrelevance of trust, and the mainstream media essentially looked the other way. Not since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy has such purposeful misrepresentation , such blatant lying, so dramatically tainted the American landscape . It has now become clear to all except the most stubborn that justification for the war against Iraq was based not on “mistaken” interpretations or “false data” but on sheer mendacity. Current discussions among politicians and investigators focus almost exclusively on the false assertion contained in sixteen words of a presidential speech to the effect that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium in Africa for his weapons of mass destruction. The forest has already been lost for the trees. We are told that the problem derived from faulty intelligence by subordinates rather than purposeful lying by those in authority. CIA officials, however, have openly stated that they were pressured to make their research results support governmental policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell has still not substantiated claims concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction that he made in his famous speech to the United Nations. Doing so would be difficult. The chief American inspector for Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has offered a report and testified before Congress that, under pressure from the United Nations, Iraq ended its nuclear program in 1991 and closed down its last biochemical weapons plant in 1996; he also found no evidence of an attempt to restart those programs (New York Times, October 7, 2004). But then various members of the Bush inner circle cheerfully admitted that the threat posed by Iraq had been grossly exaggerated. No matter: hyping the threat was useful in building a consensus for war. The Bush administration American Landscape Lies, Fears, and the Distortion of Democracy Stephen Eric Bronner 9 itself nonchalantly verified what critics always knew: that American policy was propelled by greedy thoughts of an oil-rich Iraqi nation, the desire to control water in an arid region, the opportunity to throw the fear of the Western God into Tehran and Damascus, and the chance to establish an alternative to the military presence that once existed in Saudi Arabia. Wrong on every count in Iraq—the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the threat posed by the decrepit dictatorship, the degree of popular support for American intervention , and the degree of possible resistance—the CIA was either incompetent beyond all reason or, more likely, served to protect the president from domestic criticism by acting as what Thomas Powers called a “foreign ministry of spin.” Former director of the CIA George Tenet ultimately took the fall. But the Bush administration has chastised none of the principal advisers who championed its catastrophic policy in Iraq, even as attacks by the Democratic Party with respect to the war and its conduct were qualified to the point of insignificance. “Leaders” of the so-called opposition party cowered in their offices. They obviously feared being branded disloyal. As they quaked in their boots and wrung their hands, they had little time for issues pertinent to the national interest . It was not their fault that debate over the broader justification of the war had been steadily disappearing from the widely read right-wing tabloids such as the New York Post and, at best, retreating to the middle pages of more credible newspapers. Elected politicians in both parties, scurrying for cover, routinely made sure to note that their support for the war did not rest on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Few considered it necessary to mention that the lack of such weapons, combined with the inability to find any proof of a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, invalidated the claim that Iraq posed a national security threat to the United States. Everyone in the political establishment now points to humanitarian motives. For the most part, however, such concerns were not uppermost...

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