From Adam at Words Mean Things comes word of this excellent article on that other big whopper Bush told in his last State of the Union address: Ex-officials dispute Iraq tie to al-Qaida.

Of course, it’s not really a different lie; it’s the other half of the first one. Taken together, the two assertions (Saddam is actively trying to build nuclear weapons, and is perhaps just months away from having them; Saddam is working directly with al Qaeda) were the slam-dunk that cemented the support of the US public and Congressional Democrats for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Because, you know, we get that whole mushroom-cloud-over-US-cities image in our minds, and in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that’s guaranteed to get a powerful reaction.

Even as debunked by things like Tenet’s mea culpa and the article linked to above, the idea still has traction with lots, maybe even most, of the people in this country. The way the reasoning goes is something like this: Okay, Saddam wasn’t actively trying to get Nigerian uranium. But he could very well decide to get some from somewhere else at some point in the future, and if the UN eases up on him he might eventually manage to join the likes of Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea in actually having nuclear weapons. And maybe he was only having “episodic, not continuous” dealings with al Qaeda. He was still having dealings with them. He could still decide at some point in the future to get together with them and give them some of those as-yet-hypothetical nukes.

The less we actually know, the more our conclusions are based on that murky process whereby we flesh out the unseen details using whatever it is we do know (or think we know). For someone who has never travelled, never read much of anything, and never mingled much with people outside his own narrow social sphere, it’s easy to lump outsiders into the category of “people who don’t deserve the same considerations we (that is, members of our own immediate group) do.” Throw in a little fear, and that process goes into overdrive. So even if the case against Saddam is sketchy to the point of fantasy (at least in terms of his giving nukes to al Qaeda), that fantasy is good enough for us. The worst thing that happens if we’re wrong is that a bunch of Iraqis get maimed and killed, their country’s infrastructure gets blown up, and their society is plunged into a state of perpetual violent chaos. But they’re just Iraqis, so our fears trump their concerns.

Lashing out violently at everyone around you in response to fear is an understandable reaction. It has real survival value in certain contexts. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is one of them. In this case, I think we’re being manipulated by people who have their own, largely unstated, motivations for driving us in this particular direction.

So where does Bush fall in all of this? Interestingly, I think he falls more into the category of those being manipulated, rather than those doing the manipulating. It makes him less a villain and more a victim. But either way, the man has no business being president.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, July 13th, 2003 at 8:49 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.