TRUTH OVER POLICY
I stated the other day that I thought a Dean win might work out well for the country, provided the Republicans held Congress, because the resulting gridlock would keep government spending in check, but that I wanted Bush to win anyway because I "value truth over policy." I was being cryptic, but I provoked objections, and I can see how the remark could sound blindly partisan. Doesn't George W. Bush have a truth problem. Didn't he "lie" about WMDs in Iraq? Isn't he letting his vice-president's company scoop up contracts? If you listen to the Dems, they're always insisting that "we need a government with integrity" and the like.

The thing is, I partly agree that Bush took us to war in Iraq under false pretenses. Or at least, it's possible, and I sort of hope it's true.

Here's how the story would go. Bush and Blair had several reasons they wanted to go to war. First, Saddam's regime was a horrible dictatorship which had murdered tens of thousands of people; his overthrow would be a huge humanitarian triumph. Second, they thought he had WMDs and was a threat to peace. This is no stretch; back then, everybody thought he had WMDs. The biggest reason to think he had WMDs was that he had thrown out the inspectors, at the cost of facing steep sanctions that killed (by some estimates) hundreds of thousands of his people. Third (and related to the second) WMDs became more dangerous since they could get into the hands of terrorists. The fourth reason was the sanctions themselves; because of them we became indirectly responsible for many of the deaths that took place under his regime. I will throw in, as a fifth reason, a combination of the second and fourth, namely: It would be nice to lift the sanctions, but even if Saddam's WMDs were not a major threat now, if the sanctions were lifted they could rapidly become one. Sixth, to establish a democracy in the heart of the Arab world would be especially valuable since the Arab world, and to a lesser extent the whole Islamic world, suffers from a huge freedom and democracy deficit and is the scene of a political and cultural phenomenon aptly describe as "Islamo-fascism." Seventh-- a very important and perfectly legitimate reason-- they wanted to topple Saddam because, in view of their swift and stunning success in Afghanistan, they had a new confidence that they could.

Instead of these seven reasons, of which the first one alone would be decisive, Bush and Blair chose to emphasize just one reason, the threat from Saddam's WMDs, and moreover, they chose to exaggerate it and conjure up dubious evidence in its favor. Why? Well, most of their reasons could not be avowed very publicly. They could not admit to wanting a transformation of the Middle East without spooking all their Middle Eastern allies. That argument would have worked pretty well with the US electorate, I believe, but not at all well at the dictator-legitimizing UN. They could not admit to wanting to overthrow a murderous dictator as a pure humanitarian cause, because this would introduce a revolutionary new principle into international law, which would frighten the those UN members with a taste for dictatorship and state murder. I think such a principle is just what we need right now, but it's tricky to get it off the ground. It would be awkward to admit that they wanted to put an end to the deaths of children as a result of the sanctions, since they and our allies had acquiesced in those sanctions for years.

As for the second and third reasons, they needed "proof." For obvious reasons, this was likely to be almost impossible to get. Intelligence is hard in a paranoid dictatorship like Saddam's. So they relied on rather flimsy evidence to get us into the war. A few white lies for the sake of twenty-five million people's liberty, the world's increased safety, and a splendid precedent which should make dictators everywhere permanently nervous. Was it worth it? Was it justified?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not asserting that Bush and Blair lied. I think they didn't. It's just a hypothesis. I suspect it might be true, but presidents and prime ministers should be innocent until proven guilty like the rest of us. If it is true... Tell me, would you lie to the SS to save Anne Frank from the gas chambers? I guess I see this situation in the same way. It certainly wouldn't change my support for the war, and it wouldn't really change my opinion of Bush and Blair much either.

Still, even if I think a bit of "exaggeration" and "conjuring" were justified under the circumstances, how can I still consider "truth" a reason to prefer Bush to Dean? For one thing, to elect Dean would be like a collective national avowal that invading Iraq was wrong, which would be false and insulting to the newly free Iraqi nation, but it goes beyond that. It's complicated. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to give a satisfactory explanation in this post. It has to do with the way Democrats talk down to you, with the way they let the polls define their positions, with the way they constantly compromise their principles as they move towards the center, with the way they posture themselves for political advantage, and with what the sort of beliefs that tend to inform the party base, radical environmentalism, various forms of post-Marxism, anti-globalization... various sometimes sincere but very wrong people, whom the party leaders exploit and betray... It's just an intuition of sorts, which could not be accurately expressed by something as crude as "Truth is Republican," but an intuition that if you breath free of corrupt ideological mysteries, if you're a person of clear-thinking common sense, that you'll find yourself, with respect to the political spectrum, rather on the right. When I read Democrats I tend to get a sense of having my leg, gently-gently, pulled...

Maybe I'll be able to convey it in future posts. If you have the opposite impression, please tell me about it. I'm interested.