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Fuzzing It Up |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ted Rall
(No verified email address) |
23 Jun 2004
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It's all so beautifully postmodern: all of the Bushies' lies are true. Technically. |
In the fall of 2002, fewer than a third of Americans believed that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. So George W. Bush developed a strategy for selling a war to a recalcitrant public. In statement after statement, Administration officials created the impression that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks.
Their plan worked. By the time American tanks rumbled across the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border, 70 percent of Americans thought we were avenging 9/11.
A year later, the 9/11 Commission has concluded there is "no credible evidence" of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Accused of lying about an Iraqi role in 9/11 as well as WMDs, Republicans are making a startlingly Orwellian defense: Bush & Co., they say, never said what we all heard them say.
"The press wants to run out and say there's a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the [9/11] commission said," complains Dick Cheney. "And there's no conflict. What they were addressing was whether or not [the Iraqis] were involved in 9/11. And there they found no evidence to support that proposition. I've watched a lot of the coverage on it and the fact of the matter is [the press] don't make a distinction. They fuzz it up."
Someone's been fuzzing like a madman, but the media has merely been taking dictation. In a weasely it-depends-on-the-meaning-of-is way, the Bushies are absolutely right. They never said that Saddam was behind 9/11. Not exactly.
On March 21, 2003, days before the start of war, Bush sent a letter to Congress justifying the imminent invasion: "I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
But on June 16, 2004, Bush said: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda." Sam Boone-Lutz wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times pointing to these two statements. "Explain to me," he asks, "how [the June 16, 2004] statement isn't a lie."
This is your lucky day, Sam.
Parsing statements from the current White House is impossible without a strong background in sentence diagramming. (A shout-out here to Mr. Bradfield, my old-school seventh-grade English teacher.) The key word in Bush's March 21, 2003 justification to Congress is including. He asserts that armed force is justified "against international terrorists and terrorist organizations." Everything after "including" is optional, i.e., non-conditional. Broken down to its essentials, Bush said: "I can go after terrorists, including those responsible for 9/11, but I can also go after terrorists who were not responsible for 9/11." Given the context--a notice to Congress that he is about to attack Iraq--he intended us to draw the inference that Iraq played a role in 9/11. But, strictly speaking, he doesn't say that Iraq is included among those who carried out 9/11. His statement has been carefully lawyered to create "plausible deniability" if and when, as has happened, such an assertion is belied by the facts.
Bush does clearly assert, however, that Iraq is tied to "international terrorists and terrorist organizations." This section relates to payments Saddam made to survivors of Palestinian suicide bombers who died in attacks in Israel--not the United States. If the average American knew in March 2003 that Iraq had only been involved in terrorism against Israel, but never against the United States or any other country, he wouldn't have viewed Saddam as a threat. Bush "fuzzed up" the differences between referring specific terrorism against Israel and terrorism in general, hoping that no one would notice the difference.
No one did.
White House lawyers applied similar legalese to every official pre-war statement so that, when the truth eventually came out, Bush & Co. could deny having tied Saddam to 9/11. Ordinary citizens, who quickly scan the headlines and get their news from TV, would draw the desired--incorrect--conclusion. Yet "plausible deniability" was in place as a future defense.
Any news junkie with some experience reading legal documents can extract the elusive truth from a Bush quote. On June 17, for example, Bush said that Saddam had "provided safe haven for a terrorist like [Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi, who is still killing innocents inside of Iraq." Actually, Zarqawi never lived in Saddam's Iraq; he arrived after the U.S. invasion. But a guy Bush says is like Zarqawi, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, did live in Baghdad under Saddam. To the extent that any Abu is like another, Zarqawi is like Nidal. (In this phrasing, "like" typically means "for example." In order to obfuscate, however, Bush will claim to have meant "similar to.") Yes, Nidal's Fatah organization was only a threat to Israel, never the United States. And Zarqawi's Islamist Al Qaeda never cooperated with Yassir Arafat's Fatah.
This statement elevates the craft of creating intentionally confusing syntax to dazzlingly cynical new heights. Polls confirm that such convoluted verbiage has convinced a plurality of Americans, 49 to 36 percent, that "clear evidence that Iraq was supporting Al Qaeda has been found."
It's all so beautifully postmodern: all of the Bushies' lies are true. Technically.
Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right."
COPYRIGHT 2004 TED RALL
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