"Same Intelligence," My Arse

Thanks to Joshua Micah Marshall at Talkingpointsmemo.com for bringing this to our attention. Diane Feinstein (even hacks are right every once in a while) doubted Bush's claim that Congress received the same pre-war intelligence as Bush did. So she asked the Congressional Research Service. Their response? Bush's claim is not true. In fact, the scope and depth of the CRS's refutation of Bush's lie is overwhelming.

In the current right wing orgy over Bush's stellar jump in approval ratings (possibly up to 50% now), Bush's "shocking" admission that pre-war intelligence was flawed, and the tentative success of elections in Iraq, an evaluation of the legitimacy of the decisionmaking process itself has taken a back seat. Part of the reason it has been allowed to do so is that people are buying into the notion that everyone had the same flawed pre-war intelligence. Well, they didn't.

More important than the deficit in pre-war intelligence was the obviously deliberate spin the Administration placed on the most dubious portions of that intelligence. Regardless of the culpability of other sections of the ruling class, the Administration is responsible for the poor intelligence that fed into public myths about ties between Iraq and Al Qaida . And despite the best efforts of a particularly ridiculous Heritage Foundation argument that all the pre-war intelligence was legit (give us a break!), it's still indisputable that Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and all their dogs continued to repeat claims to the media with utter confidence after it was revealed to them that those claims were at least doubtful and probably completely dubious--claims like "nuclear materials," "45 minutes," "mushroom cloud" and the like. Moreover, Bush and Cheney continued, and continue, to invoke 9/11 in defense of the invasion of Iraq.

The subsidiary claim that Clinton and others made the same arguments really proves nothing. Clinton was as much of a warmongering hack as his successor, and in fact bombed Iraq to distract the public from a sex scandal, which may even be more small-minded than the Bush Administration.

Now a couple of pre-empts for the stubborn:

1. Even if it could be proven that Congress had each and every piece of information that the Administration had (and the CRS letter confidently refutes that), this would only make Congress complicit in the non-deliberative process leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I am perfectly comfortable blaming the Democrats. I just want to know what to blame them for, and thanks to the CRS letter, I know I can blame them for spinelessness and impotency rather than unmitigated dishonesty--at least some of them, and at least on the issue of Iraq.

2. "But the invasion and occupation have been a great success! We got rid of Saddam and he was a bad guy! The elections are working out great! The world is a safer place." Yeah, well listen: I have long warned the anti-war movement not to base their criticism on disputable empirical facts. I will say the same for the pro-invasion/occupation folks. Your defense of the war, your eagerness to minimize the impact of torture, your brushing off of international law and global cooperation, your defense of planting and paying for lies in the media, and your deliberate historical ignorance of the way the U.S. and its allies empowered Saddam in the first place (to say nothing of your complete silence on the corporatization of the occupation and the unprecedented corruption sanctioned by the Administration), cannot be papered over with human interest stories about liberated Iraqis. Morality, even political morality, is capable of the complex, simultaneous acknowledgment of good and bad, despite the best efforts of Straussian neocons to eliminate complexity, to ban it, really, from the masses.

Both sides, I will acknowledge are spinning, both sides are converting innocent lives into political capital. I don't trust a Murtha any more than I trust a Rumsfeld. Why should I? But that "pox on both your houses" doesn't excuse the pro-war side from its defense of all sorts of anti-democratic actions, including lying to both Americans and Iraqis through engineered media reports. It doesn't excuse the right from using both 9/11 and Iraq to justify pushing through an agenda they wanted all along.

The ends do not justify the means. Not merely because of some kind of Kantian categorical imperative, but because there is always an intimate, ontological relationship between process and outcome. That is the truth behind the Habermasian test: Decisions made when information is deliberately withheld and distorted, and when those "little people" affected by such decisions are denied the ability to be agents in the decisionmaking process, are always bad decisions. Sometimes the "badness" of such decisions isn't apparent until much, much later. But bad decisions they are, because democratic deliberation cannot just be something we adhere to when it's convenient or politically expedient, and honesty is not something we can choose to deploy only when the outcome suits us. Even if the pro-war folks can spin their way out of each and every objection, even if they seize control of every history book and editorial page for the next hundred years, the lies, distortions, and omissions will show themselves in the end. The CRS report is a good first step in demonstrating that even Bush's clumsy apologetics are based on lies and spin. And if the best answer anyone can give is that all sides of the ruling class are equally culpable in the lies and spin, I will readily accept that indictment.