From Today’s New York Times
To the Editor:
“Why Congress Should Embrace the Surge,” by Owen West (Op-Ed, May 1), suggests that Congress and the American public should trust those who started and executed this war with 10 more years to “win.” This misses the forest (a wrong war) for some trees (how to win).
Many Americans now see that the war in Iraq was based on lies and deceptions, misunderstanding of the task, and narrow ideologies of a few in power.
We see that it had nothing to do with terrorism, that it has destabilized the Middle East and increased the terrorist threat, ruined America’s moral authority in the world, cost the world tens of thousands of lives, and that four years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the United States clearly has not had a coherent strategy to “win the peace.”
We don’t know the best course out of this quagmire, but we know an unnecessary disaster when we see one.
So we have asked for change. We hope that these new leaders will find a solution.
Erec Stebbins
New York, May 1, 2007
Note from KBJ: I have yet to hear a persuasive argument that President Bush lied about the war in Iraq (or anything else, for that matter). For the umpteenth time, a lie is a falsehood told with intent to deceive. Therefore, President Bush lied if and only if:
1. He uttered a statement that, at the time he uttered it, he believed to be false; and
2. His intention, at the time he uttered the statement, was to deceive someone.
If President Bush lied, it should be easy to supply evidence for each of these conditions. Please, Erec Stebbins, tell us which statement President Bush believed to be false at the time he uttered it, and supply your evidence for this belief; then supply evidence that he uttered the statement with the intention to deceive. If you can’t do all of this, then you should stop saying that President Bush lied. How would you like it if someone accused you of lying but could not provide evidence for it?
19 Comments
I ceased having this argument with my liberal friends because they cannot see the difference between believing something that is false (Saddam has WMD) and saying something you know to be false in order to deceive.
I have even tried pointing out that President Bush was just one of many (Kennedy, Kerry, Clinton, Reid, Gore, and more) who believed these things and talked about them publicly. Oh, they say, but that is because Bush was so clever at deceiving them! But many of the aforementioned folk were saying these things about Saddam in public long before George W. Bush became President. Says I: “Besides, I thought you told me that GWB was a moron, how is it that he was able to deceive so many smart and clever people?”.
I chalk it up to BDS because these are otherwise intelligent people.
Comment :: Wednesday, 2 May 2007 @ 11:24 PM
I believe the “lie” claim comes from the fact that at the time when Bush and those in his administration, as well as many in the media, were claiming to be certain about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the intelligence community was deeply divided on this question (with the CIA largely skeptical, and the UN inspectors believing no evidence of the current presence of WMD in Iraq existed). There’s also the issue of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, with some arguing that it was clear that no real connection existed between the two (the CIA certainly thought that was clear). Whether the Bush administration, which had its own intelligence sources (primarily one Iraqi expatriot, who, it should be noted, the CIA did not have access to), genuinely believed that Iraq had WMD and operational connections with Al Qaeda is a question about their state of mind, and therefore impossible to answer, but there is at least evidence that they should have had a great deal of doubt, even if they didn’t.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 27:32 AM
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t an Iraqi general claim the Russians helped transport the WMD goods out of the country? How about the Syrians stopped at the border with Sarin Gas or the scientist that claims they were working on nuclear technology. How about Joe Wilson found to be a liar by the 911 commission? Why no uproar over Oil for Food with Russia, France, and Germany and we should be concerned about the world view of us. Then we have our seditious media, congress, and George Bush and the Republicans will stand up for themselves either. Watch the series Jericho Washington it could happen you Ostrich people, whoops Hedgehogs.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 39:14 AM
You make a good point, Chris. There’s a difference between lying and being reckless (or negligent) with the truth. The former requires a specific belief (viz., that what one says is false) and a specific intention (viz., to deceive). The latter does not. Suppose I assert something but don’t know whether it’s true—and in fact am aware of a high probability that it’s false. I haven’t lied, but that doesn’t mean I’m not culpable. Perhaps President Bush was reckless (or merely negligent) in some of his utterances about Iraq. If so, then he is culpable. What I object to is the accusation that he lied. That is a terrible thing to say of someone, especially the president of our country. Sloppiness may be tolerable in some realms, but it’s intolerable (morally) when making an accusation. I’m also concerned about conceptual inflation. If we use the word “lie” so loosely that it includes reckless or negligent utterance, or even just the utterance of a falsehood, then it loses its meaning.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 42:51 PM
Keith, I agree with you about the misuse of the word “lie.” It’s clear, at this point, that they were wrong, and that there was information available at the time, in both the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, and in the press so that the American people could access it, to indicate that their case was not as strong as it was made out to be. But since lying vs. negligence is, as I said, an issue of state of mind, and short of discovering a memo in which someone high up in the administration explicitly says that they know that their case was dubious, we can’t know their state of mind, and therefore we can’t reasonably say they were lying.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 53:20 PM
I’m puzzled by your remarks, Chris. Every crime has a mental state (mens rea) as an element. The Model Penal Code specifies four distinct mental states: purpose (i.e., intention), knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. Not only are these mental states required to be proved by the prosecutor; they must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt! Every day, in every criminal court in the land, prosecutors prove intention, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, in our everyday lives, we ascertain people’s mental states. If we could not, we would have no concept of lying, which presupposes two distinct mental states: belief and intention. One of the most basic distinctions we draw is that between doing something on purpose and doing it accidentally. In short, there is no principled barrier to ascertaining mental states.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 63:34 PM
I am puzzled by Chris’s comment that the CIA was largely skeptical that there were WMDs in Iraq. My recollection is that the CIA called it a “slam dunk” that there were WMDs.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 73:49 PM
George Tenet, the head of the CIA during that time, said he believed Iraq had WMD from his 10 years of following it, and that he “believed it to his core”.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 84:41 PM
JJS, Tenet did say it was a “slam dunk.” In recent interviews, he’s stood firmly by that statement as well. But if you go back and read the Knight-Ridder report from the second half of 2002 and early 2003, you’ll see that a consistent message was coming out of the CIA (not from its director, obviously, but from the people handling the actual intelligence): we’re skeptical of the administration’s/state department’s independent intelligence analysis. Furthermore, the UN, which was operating on US intelligence, was repeatedly finding it to be faulty, and was saying so. The information was available for anyone willing to hear it, but most people (including, I should say, most Democrats) weren’t.
Keith, you’re right, mental state attributions are important for many crimes, and if not for proving that the act occurred, then for proving what sort of punishment is appropriate (is it Murder 1 or Murder 2, e.g.?). However, a recent high profile perjury cases have highlighted, in order to prove that a person has lied or perjured him or herself, the prosecution has to show that he or she knowingly made false statements. That’s very difficult to do. In the case of the administration and intelligence on Iraq, it means finding statements to the effect that someone high up was aware that there were serious flaws in the intelligence upon which they were relying. No one has produced such statements yet, and I can’t imagine anyone ever will. So saying that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or whoever lied about the intelligence is irresponsible.
Intention, unlike knowledge, can be fairly easily demonstrated by looking at someone’s behavior. Did they make preparations for a particular act, for example? Lying, on the other hand, can produce the exact same behaviors as negligence. That is, people can operate on false information, even when there were reasons to suspect it was false, because they believed it was true in the face of that evidence or because they actually doubted it but stated that there were no good reasons to doubt it. There could be behavioral differences — for example, if someone tried to hide the information casting doubt on the false information — but that’s not easy to discover either, and I haven’t seen anyone produce such evidence when calling those in the Bush administration liars.
Comment :: Thursday, 3 May 2007 @ 96:36 PM
Must be a blog by and for lawyers, hence the lawyerly standards.
Indeed, if Bush et al had “lied” according to your standards (ie in a fashion that is documented and “beyond any reasonable doubt”) with the intent to bring the nation to war (a giant failure currently in its 4th year), then I would certainly hope you all would be the FIRST to prosecute him as the worst of criminals (seeing that he would have the blood of tens of thousands on his hands — indeed, the Hague comes to mind, as the proper venue, but I am unsure as to whether american jurists subscribe to the concept of an International Tribune — unless of course its workings suit our needs?)
But I suspect that, even lawyers cannot disagree (as it is fully documented in the press) that Bush et al are responsible for misreading intelligence, because of their belief (also clearly documented) that their fear would be justified (ie Iraq did possess WMD). Eagerness to interpret one’s own data a certain way introduces biases that almost always lead to the wrong outcome. That’s an elementary lesson for budding scientists, and one that, I would hope, can cross disciplines. When my experiments fail because of my eagerness to overinterpret the data, I lose a chance to understand how the physical world works. When Bush et al (and Kerry, and Clinton etc etc) overinterpret their data, people die.
So although it is possible that our politicians are not liars, it is a fact that they are incompetent individuals whose biases led them to misread intelligence and order up a war, to misread intelligence and botch the peace, to further misread intelligence and fail to prevent civil war etc etc. But now, Owen tells us, this time, for sure they have it right. Just give them another 10 years. Sure. And based of past performance we should trust them? why, exactly?
Comment :: Saturday, 5 May 2007 @ 109:34 PM
Nice rant, Nina. If you read my post carefully, you’ll see that my concern is with the scurrilous claim that President Bush lied. I’ve shown what you must do to make that accusation stick. Nothing you’ve said does the job.
Comment :: Saturday, 5 May 2007 @ 119:43 PM
Dear Keith, thanks for taking an interest in my letter to the NY Times. Perhaps your concerns about my accusing Bush of lying can be lessened by noting that I do not, in fact, accuse him of such, and have mentioned no person in or out of the administration by name. That “lies and deceptions” took place is now well documented in the lead up to war (the uranium data, for example, comes to mind). Fraudulent information is, to my mind, equivalent to a lie. Therefore, my statement that “Many Americans now see that the war in Iraq was based on lies and deceptions, misunderstanding of the task, and narrow ideologies of a few in power” remains factual, I believe, and not unfair. Whether Bush (or Cheney or Rice etc) lied (knowing spread false or distorted information), is yet to be “proven.” I hope this addresses some of your concerns.
Comment :: Tuesday, 8 May 2007 @ 128:06 AM
If someone lied, Erec, you should be able to do all the things I specified. Name the person; quote the person; show that the person believed the statement to be false at the time of utterance; show that the person intended to deceive someone. You’re a smart, energetic person. You should be able to do all these things. If not, then you should not accuse someone of lying.
Comment :: Tuesday, 8 May 2007 @ 133:28 PM
I will simply return to the example I provided: the African uranium issue, that several national and international reports have concluded were fraudulent. Do you wish me to provide citations for this, or is the public record sufficient? If you accept that they were fraudulent, then someone has lied and deceived, and since the justifications for war were based strongly on this evidence (as evinced in the President’s address prior to the invasion of Iraq, for example: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”), then the war was “based on lies and deceptions.” Therefore, I still believe that my letter is not “scurrilous ” or inaccurate in any way. Whether members of the Bush administration fully believed the reports, and therefore passed them on to the American people in good faith devoid of political considerations, is another story, one for which only educated conjecture can be made given the evidence known.
Comment :: Tuesday, 8 May 2007 @ 149:05 PM
You’re not listening, Erec. For it to be a lie, the utterer must believe the statement to be false at the time of utterance. What is your evidence that President Bush believed the statement to be false at the time he uttered it? If you have no evidence, then you’re just making it up.
Comment :: Tuesday, 8 May 2007 @ 159:55 PM
Eric, you ignore that the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the Britain’s Butler Commission found there was good reason to believe Iraq had sought uranium.
Comment :: Tuesday, 8 May 2007 @ 1611:05 PM
Erec,
You conflate the fraudulent Italian reports (of Saddam trying to acquire uranium from Africa) with Bush’s famous 16 words. This is understandable because, at the time, many news sources tied the two together. However, the official administration position for retracting those 16 words is that Bush decided it was not right to use British intelligence to make the case for going to war. Bush, nor anybody in the Bush administration, has never indicated that this British intelligence was inaccurate. Furthermore, the British–to this day–stand by their intelligence that Saddam did, in fact, attempt to acquire uranium from Africa.
And, no matter how hard you try, you can not run away from the fact that Clinton’s head of CIA said it was a slam dunk. It was Tenet’s job to present the most accurate assessment possible. He said it was a slam dunk. Yes, a SLAM DUNK. In my mind, the President would have been negligent if he did not set policy with the belief that Saddam had WMD. Any other assessment is just Monday morning quarterbacking.
Comment :: Wednesday, 9 May 2007 @ 171:38 AM
Hi Keith, I think I’ll close with this because we are speaking past each other. I have clearly addressed your point, so that your issue with whether I am justified to call Bush a liar in my letter is not relevant, because I did not so call him. It is curious to me that you have ignored this fact even as I have mentioned it twice now, and have failed to address any point I made in this regard. In that sense, “discussion” between us ended almost as soon as it began. Stephen: to my mind, there are just too many reports over the last feew years (US Congressional and British leaked, as well as UN) that clearly show the uranium data was fradulant. What Bush believed at the time is actually unclear to me. But in terms of my letter, and the general point that some of the key justifications for the war were based on data that was fradulant, I still stand by my words. Thanks for the debate, and I wish Keith the best in “clarifying” discourse, as that is a noble cause.
Comment :: Wednesday, 9 May 2007 @ 187:39 AM
Take care, Erec. Thanks for commenting. I will close with this. It’s people who lie. Particular people on particular occasions. If you believe that a lie was told by someone in the Bush administration, you should be able to specify which person (by name) uttered which statement on which occasion, and then proceed to show (1) that, at the time the statement was uttered, the person believed it to be false, and (2) that, at the time the statement was uttered, the person intended to deceive someone. You did say “lies” in your New York Times letter, right? I have no idea what you’re talking about or why you would make such a scurrilous accusation without adducing any evidence for it. That the Times published your letter says a lot about the newspaper’s integrity (or lack thereof).
Comment :: Wednesday, 9 May 2007 @ 1911:18 AM