June 13, 2003

Why It Matters

To continue of the topic of whether Bush, or the Bush Administration (for brevity, I’ll use Bush for the rest of the piece, but Bush will refer to the President and the Administration.) lied to advance their arguments for war, it’s time to talk about what this would mean, and why it would matter.

For some of the advocates of the Bush Lied thesis, proving the Administration lied will also validate their thesis that the war itself was wrong. Unfortunately for them, this isn’t necessarily the case, and it’s not why the question matters. Let’s address each of those in turn.

The invasion of Iraq was right or wrong regardless of what arguments were used to support it. While I failed to copy the link, another blogger pointed this out earlier in the week. If it was wrong to invade Iraq, would the fact the Bush Administration was scrupulously honest in its arguments somehow make the invasion more palatable? Conversely, if it was right to invade, lies by the Bush Administration do not make the invasion somehow wrong. For example, let’s stipulate that the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s horrific regime justified the war. (I wouldn’t concur with that, but let’s use it as a hypothetical.) Would the fact the Administration had lied about the reasons to go to war make the invasion wrong? I can’t see that it does. The question of the invasion is a separate question from the issue of lies.

But that hardly means the question of the Administration’s honesty isn’t important. The decision to go to war is one of the most important decisions a democracy will ever make. That decision has to be made on the facts. Really, any decision the administration requires public support for should be based on the facts, but the addition of the risks of combat add to that burden. An administration that is willing to lie in order to drag the country to war is not worthy of support. As Jim Henley pointed out earlier today, the administration gets the benefit of the doubt when it makes proclamations, because it has access to information from intelligence agencies that the rest of us don’t see. But if it abuses that trust, it establishes that nothing it says can be trusted from that point forward. And while, as I suggested above, the fact the Administration lied doesn’t make a just war unjust, if the Administration did feel it had to lie to get support for the war, it does raise the question of how valid they really thought the war was in the first place.

As I’ve noted before, saying the Administration lied doesn’t make it so. But there’s a real question about how honest the Administration was in making its case for war. If the Bush Administration did mislead us in order to gain support for the war, then that needs to be publicized, and the Administration should pay a steep political price. In other words, if the Administration lied about its reasons for going to war, then they deserve to be (and hopefully will be) soundly repudiated at the polls next year.

Posted at 09:58 PM | Philosophy | TrackBack (0)