Isn't Cohen's claim that Bush took us to war "for false reasons" (plural) a bald-faced lie? Bush gave several reasons for deposing Saddam. You can count them various ways, but here's a quick summary: (a) to bring democracy to Iraq by (b) removing a brutal tyrant who had slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved his people for decades and (c) invaded neighboring countries while (d) actively supporting terrorism and (e) stockpiling massive quantities of weapons, including (f) WMDs. Only the last reason turned out false, or rather unproven, since we only know that Saddam had either (1) secretly destroyed all his WMDs without retaining any evidence that he had done so, or (2) done a very thorough job of burying them in the desert and/or shipping them to Syria. In an imperfect world, 5 out of 6 is not a bad score. To return to my main point, when Cohen says "for false reasons" instead of "for reasons that were all entirely true except one, and even that is arguable", he's a bigger liar than Bush will ever be, because his statement is not only false but easy to check right now: he doesn't need to invade a medium-sized country to see whether it's true.

Mr. Cohen's audience is not interested in dialectic but spleen and he is their able servant. The audience is neither large, thoughtful, nor influential enough with others to change the outcome of a presidential election. In other words, Mr. Cohen is like Jim Jones haranguing his People's Temple sect while The Washington Post serves as a virtual Jonestown.

I'd say that sensible people don't concatenate "Bush lied" (which he did) and "Iraq is turning out to be OK" (which is debatable, but I'll so stipulate for this discussion). OTOH, Straussians and neocons do concatenate the two, since to them, apparently, the ends justify the means.

The question I have for you then, is: do they, ever?

Of course there are times when the end justifies the means. Only angels can avoid them. War is in its essence "the ends justify the means." It invariably employs savage violence and deception and lives thrown away by mistakes to achieve what we hope will be an end that can be considered justification.

We flawed humans do it constantly. Your own views, in so far as one can discern them, reek of "ends justify the means." You claim, for instance, to believe in the importance of tradition in political life. But our tradition is that Americans pull together in wartime, even if we feel bitter because our party is in the minority, as Republicans felt at the time of WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Or even if we are angry because, for instance, FDR blatantly lied about what he had done to support Britain before Pearl Harbor.

You are flouting your belief in tradition to support some undefined political end. (I am assuming your negativity has some end in mind, and is not mere nihilism).

You don't really care that Bush lied (if you had discovered that Kerry or Clionton lied when they said Saddam had WMD's, you would have shrugged it off.) Your comment is a good example of "Weidner's Law." You are using "Bush lied" as an excuse to avoid your obligation as an American to be thrilled and delighted that our efforts have just led to the end of the brutal 30-year occupation of Lebanon.

(And if Bush had really been lying when he said Saddam had WMD's he could easily have covered his ass by saying things like "We are 90% sure that Saddam has WMD's.")

John, please, you know you have no right to make those assumptions about my motivations. ("You don't really care that Bush lied...") I can excuse you making such assertions about someone you do not know; I find it hard to do so given our friendship. How would you feel if I asserted that it's only because of unresolved issues with your father that you're unable to question the rightness of the President's actions, or something similar? Why do you assume I would shrug off lies by a different administration? For that matter, what difference do my motivations make to the argument? Come on, that's just a puerile ad hominem attack.

But, to be perfectly clear, I don't think the ends ever justify the means: that road leads to hell, no matter whom you follow. Of course I am delighted that Lebanon seems to be making progress; I am glad to see signs of progress in Iraq--but again, I insist that these things do not and cannot justify some of the actions that helped bring them about.

You assert that "War is in its essence "the ends justify the means." It invariably employs savage violence and deception..." I agree; it's just that decent leaders do not employ such means against their own people. Lying to the enemy and lying to the people who chose you for a position of public trust are two very different things. If you, one of the most fundamentally decent people I know, can accept even a fraction of the Straussian political dynamic, I tremble for our republic. That way lies destruction.

As for the list of reasons for the Iraq war offered above by another commenter, does anyone really believe that, absent "WMD" and "Saddam and terrorism," the two assertions that were lies, the other reasons would have convinced the American people to go to war. Brutal tyrant? There are plenty of those--I don't see people lining up to take them out.

And please, I expect better from you than that dreadful nationalist cant about the tradition of pulling together in wartime. The hell with that, if the war is wrong--and no war founded on lies can be right. (WWII was not founded on anything FDR may have done or not done about Pearl Harbor.)

I will render unto Caesar that which is rightly his, but I will not surrender my God-given right to judge him wrong and withhold my sanction from my nation's evil actions, and to hold my leaders accountable for their transgressions, no matter what the situation. Only tyranny would expect otherwise, and we are still far from that.

The "two assertions that were lies" were not lies.

If French, German, and Russian intelligence, Bill Clinton, and Saddam's own generals all thought he had WMDs, how can you assume that Bush must have known different? It's not like the CIA is known for its competence. It's not even certain that the common belief was false: the failure to find much of anything after the war could mean that Saddam did an impressively thorough job of hiding them or shipping them to Syria, rather than that they never existed.

As for Saddam's support for terrorism, Bush never said that he planned, supported, or had foreknowledge of 9-11. That he actively supported terrorism is simple fact. He sent large checks to the families of the Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered hundreds of Israelis and dozens of Americans, sent a car bomb to Kuwait to blow up former president Bush, put up murals celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center, and provided safe haven and HQs for more than one notorious terrorist. Looks like supporting terrorism to me.

By the way, I recall opponents of the war claiming that it would inevitably lead to epidemics, millions of refugees, mass starvation, environmental devastation from hundreds of oil-well fires (as in Gulf War I), and out and out civil war between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. They were wrong about all of these. Epidemics? shortly after the war started, there were a dozen or so cases of cholera or typhoid (I forget which), but the mini-epidemic was quickly squelched. Refugees? Mark Steyn visited a refugee camp just across the border in Jordan and found hundreds of empty tents and a single family of 7 refugees already thinking of going back home. Starvation? Hasn't happened. Oil well fires? Again, there were 7, and 6 were put out in the first 2 days, while the 7th took a week or so. Civil war? The Baathists and their foreign buddies are desperately trying to start one by slaughtering Shiites and blowing up their mosques, but so far the Shiites haven't obliged. Do I conclude from this that opponents of the war were all liars? Or even fools? No, just utterly mistaken. It would be nice if they would return the courtesy when supporters of the war turn out to be mistaken in some ways.

[update: Ooops, I see that I'm duplicating Dr Weevil's points. We must have posted at the same time]

Dave,

I should not have speculated about your motivations, and I apologize.

But it's hard not to speculate on motivations when you won't answer to my points with logic or facts.

You present no evidence that "Bush lied," and you never answer the objection that France/Russia/CIA/Pentagon/Germany/Democrats/Congressional Intelligence Committees/Jordan/Egypt (and, we now know from the Duelfer Report, Saddam's own top aides and generals) ALL believed that Iraq had WMD's. Yet supposedly Bush psychically perceived that Saddam had no WMD's and proceeded to hoodwink everybody into believing what they already believed, and didn't make the slightest attempt to cover himself from the embarrassment that would ensue when no weapons were were found. Right. Sure.

Also, "Saddam and terrorism" is true. There is no doubt or question that Saddam supported terrorist groups, including ones that killed Americans. (The doubtful area is whether his shadowy contacts with al Qaeda extended to a point that can be called "support.")

And FDR's lies didn't start a war, but they were used to cover support for British warfare and espionage, and also to obscure that our ships were actually fighting U-boats in the Atlantic well before Pearl Harbor. They got us involved, and imaginably might have gotten us into war. Our participation in WWII was partially founded on lies.

You claim to believe that the ends never justify the means, but I've never known you to apply that standard to anyone who's not a Republican. Maybe I just missed it. If I'm speculating about your motivations, you have only yourself to blame, because you are always sniping from concealed positions. You jab at my "nationalism," but does that mean you don't believe in nationalism? We'll never know. You get to hurl criticisms from a seemingly lofty height, but you can't be criticized in return because you don't reveal what you stand for.

Dave, weren't you the one, who was musing that George Bush, was a Iranian mole, because it
turned out on of the people of Chalabi's staff
(who had so little clout, he was appointed oil
minister by Shia-Kurd coalition) had some Iranian
contacts; right; and Diane from Gotham, who seems
to have drifted into Move on land, was linking this
comment

Dave Trowbridge's observations regarding lies and leaders raises the following question:

Are leaders put in power (in a democracy) solely to serve as agents of the people? Or do they have a responsibility to some higher aspect, be it the ideals of the nation or the national interest?

If it is solely the former, of course, then we would expect a government of pork barrels, and are in no real position to criticize, are we?

More to the point: What if the people want policy X, and policy X is likely to lead to disaster? It may be known that policy X will lead to disaster (through means that cannot be divulged) or it may be suspected that policy X will lead to disaster (as FDR and Churchill felt in the period before Pearl Harbor and September 2, 1939, respectively).

In either case, is it the task of the leadership to try and avert said disaster? Or to allow the nation to fall into disaster, but with a "cleaner" conscience?

Yes, the argument of "higher interest" could easily be abused, and has been throughout history. But just because it can be abused hardly means that the argument is wrong.

That's one of the (many) questions that I think can never have a difinitive answer. Which is why you will probably never see me joining any of the "ism's" that claim to have systems that can be applied generally (socialism, libertarianism, etc).

Dave would probably disagree. (And I know him personally to be a very sincere and honest fellow, so I don't want to be hard on him, though I think he really should apply his scrupulosity equally to the leftish anti-war choir he seems to be humming along with. they seem to rather blatantly believe that the end ustifies their means.)

Actually I think there was some deception on the part of the administration, though not the deceptions Dave is claiming.

There are certain things you are not allowed to say in polite society, even if everybody knows they are true. (Like when some loathed person dies, you have to pretend to be saddened. A good deception that serves the cause of civility.)

Likewise, we couldn't say: "We won't make progress against the terrorists until we change the terror-supporting countries. And we won't change them until we forcefully remove one of them." (An obvious truth, because their policy of proxy-war-by-terrorist is based on the belief that we won't respond with military force.) "And taking out one of them will empower pursuit of peaceful change of the rest of them" (Wheich seems to be just what is happening now.)

The administration couldn't say such things, but I don't think that affects the legitimacy of our actions, since I'm confident that the majority of Americans would agree with this. "Yeah, that's just like my old neighborhood..."

Actually, I'm not so sure the Left subscribes to "the ends justify the means." Often, watching their hand-wringing and incessant protestations, I suspect that they actually believe that "the means justify the ends."

That is, so long as the methods are laudable (protests, non-violence, etc.), effectiveness and desired outcomes are optional. How often have we heard that the use of force was not justified, even with regards to Saddam? Better sanctions than war (in 1991, or in 2003), better no sanctions than sanctions (between 1991 and 2003).

All so that the Left can claim a certain moral virtue, never mind if more people die as a result.

I should clarify something. I said, "of course the ends justify the means," but that's not exactly what I meant. I think the formula itself is misleading because it frames the question in a way that misses what happens in real life.

Life, and especially governance, is not a science, but rather an improvisatory art, and one that calls on a varied toolkit, including sometimes things that are immoral. Especially in that little matter of "provide for the common defense."

And sensible people do what needs to be done, and never move into the realm of abstractions. It's the theorist types who think life can be lived by, well, theories. And sometimes commit the biggest atrocities of all in order to make people fit their theories. At gunpoint, marched off to the reeducation camps.

As it happens, sensible people usually try to nudge things in a moral and just direction, simply because that's what works best in most cases and is most practical in the long run...

I think the phrase you're looking for is "choosing the lesser of two evils". In politics and out of it, failing to choose may lead to a greater evil, so letting things go wherever they're already headed is not necessarily the moral choice.

I'm always amazed by the argument that we shouldn't liberate one country from brutal tyranny if we can't liberate them all. I suppose we shouldn't have bothered sending help to tsunami victims: since we couldn't save them all, why even try to save any of them?

The argument about ends and means would be a lot more convincing if liberating Iraq and Afghanistan had required enslaving some other country, but I don't see how the people of (e.g.) Uzbekistan are at all worse off from their brutal rulers' closer military ties with the U.S. On the other hand, if (very hypothetically) the only way to get Saddam out of power had been to hand over Iceland or Costa Rica or some other peaceful well-governed country to him and his Baathist thugs for 20 years of looting, rape, and mass murder, that would have been deeply immoral. But that's not what happened, is it? Just as the U.S. temporarily allied itself with Stalin to defeat Hitler, we have temporarily allied ourselves with the likes of Uzbekistan to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan. Better two out of three than none at all, and the epidemic of freedom, having recently passed through Georgia, Ukraine, and Lebanon, is likely to reach Uzbekistan sooner now than it would have if Iraq and Afghanistan were still slave-states.

P.S. Two slight additions:

1. At the end of the first paragraph, letting things slide is not necessarily the moral choice, EVEN IF it allows you to feel better about not getting your hands dirty.

2. In the middle of the third, enslaving one country to free a second from slavery would be utterly wrong, EVEN IF (as in the examples) the first country was much smaller. The "greatest good of the greatest number" does not necessarily justify any action.

I'm just now recovering from a week at a computer conference in Las Vegas, and had just about finished a long post in response to all this when I hit the wrong button and it vanished into the ether. So, briefly:

Fewer and fewer people were convinced of WMDs as the inspections continued, and certainly not to a level that they felt justified war.

Bush and his cronies lie by assertion/disavowal/retraction/indirection as well as directly.

It is true that Saddam supported terrorism to some extent; I was in error to assert the contrary categorically. His support did not constitute an imminent danger of the level asserted: the clever rhetoric (referred to above) of the Bush administration was designed to, successfully, convince the American people that he was indeed implicated in 9/11 as one justification for war.

But all that is beside the point. What really matters is your "couldn't say/would agree" assertion, which horrifies me and proves my point about the corruption of political discourse that is taking place under the ascendant GOP. (And probably would also under an equally ascendant Dem administration, in line with Acton's aphorism--although the particulars would be different.)

"There are certain things you are not allowed to say in polite society, even if everybody knows they are true. (Like when some loathed person dies, you have to pretend to be saddened. A good deception that serves the cause of civility.)

"Likewise, we couldn't say: 'We won't make progress against the terrorists until we change the terror-supporting countries. And we won't change them until we forcefully remove one of them.' (An obvious truth, because their policy of proxy-war-by-terrorist is based on the belief that we won't respond with military force.) 'And taking out one of them will empower pursuit of peaceful change of the rest of them' (Wheich seems to be just what is happening now.)

"The administration couldn't say such things, but I don't think that affects the legitimacy of our actions, since I'm confident that the majority of Americans would agree with this. 'Yeah, that's just like my old neighborhood...'"

John, that's either utter bullshit or pure Strassian evil. (I'm sure it's not dishonest rhetoric, although it shares the category-switching technique beloved of politicos on both sides of the aisle and brought to a fine art by the present administration.)

We are not talking about etiquette here: people don't die when someone eulogizes a wicked man. We are not talking about civility, but war, suffering, and death. We are not talking about social norms but the heart of republican democracy, and that viewpoint, if I understood it correctly, is rotten to the core. You are saying that the American people would not have supported the war based on the real reason for it, and so the administration had to lie to them. That's exactly how this discussion started--I say that is unacceptable, and I find it hard to believe that you don't also.

If you want to go further with this, let's confine ourselves to that point (and I realize that Straussian is probably not the best adjective--diabolical is probably better, but I'm open to suggestions)--the rest of it is just window-dressing.

Finally, to answer Lurking's comment: in a republican democracy, the "higher interest" argument cannot be sustained, for it strikes at the very heart of that form of government. Either we have a government of, for, and by the people, or we do not.

This isn't a fair argument. You are framing this conversation as if Weidner is engaging in "political discourse" and Trowbridge is just speaking plain truths from the heart. But you appear to be at least echoing or sailing in company with a certain stream of notorious political discourse. One that I think is permeated with deliberate lies and evasions, and is characterized by a belief that "ends justify means."

But my hands are tied. You react with anger when I speculate about your motivations, or your possible political alignment. And you don't like it when I generalize-about or criticize this particular stream of discourse. You don't like it when I call certain people "leftizoid" or "leftish" or such. (But I try to make labels stick because they are engaging in dishonest political discourse by shifting their identities: liberals, moderates, progressives, centrists, etc...)

We can't have a fair debate, because I do not accept the unspoken premises that seem to underlie what you are saying, yet you don't seem to want to be pinned down or have your assumptions questioned.

I do NOT accept the premise that advocating an attack on Iraq is a "choice" that involves "war, suffering, and death," but that trying to stop that invasion is somehow not also a choice that will kill LOTS of people.

I do NOT accept the premise that those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were for "against war," when in fact they were supporting the continuation of Iraq's internal war that was killing tens-of-thousands of people every year.

I do NOT accept the premise that rogue states can support secret terrorist wars against us, but we must regard them as 'sovereign states" that can only be attacked after overt acts of war.

"You are saying that the American people would not have supported the war based on the real reason for it, and so the administration had to lie to them..." You mistook me, I said: "I'm confident that the majority of Americans would agree with this." And any dishonesty results from the worlds being enmeshed in tangles of dishonest political discourse, where it is considered improper for the US or Israel to defend themselves. (In fact I don't think the Administration did lie on this point; it knew that ordinary Americans would perceive the truth, that our position is that we have the right to defend ourselves, and also perceive that much of what was said was just the political correctness needed in a dishonest political environment.)

I do NOT accept the conventions of discourse that say the US must be accountable to the UN, but Iraq can repeatedly flout binding UN resolutions with impunity. [Including UN 1441. The inspectors were in Iraq not to hunt for weapons, but to verify that Saddam had complied with the resolution, which they were unable to do.]

AND, I do NOT accept your premise, that IF we lied about our reasons for the Iraq Campaign, the whole enterprise becomes evil and wrong. That is a philosophical position, not a self-evident truth. But I can't argue fairly because you don't expose your philosophy. You have an appearance of using this argument dishonestly, by only applying it when it suits your ends. (As an example, certain people have deliberately twisted the fact that it is unclear whether Iraq supported al Qaeda into the falsehood that Iraq did not support terrorists [and therefore Bush lied]. You used this argument, and didn't seem concerned when its falsehood was pointed out. Perhaps you didn't get around to that point, but you have an appearance of using your argument about honesty only when it suits you.)

There's no point in arguing here if I have to accept your philosophical positions without challenge. If I said, "Trowbridge is evil because he eats meat," you would certainly want to ask if I've become a Buddhist, or if I criticized everybody the same way, or if I ate meat myself. And if I wouldn't answer, the discussion would be fruitless...

Well, if I were to subscribe to your rather Manichean view, I guess we do not have a government of/by/for the people.

In which case, the author of those words, too, must not have believed in it, since in the course of time, he altered the reason we went to war from "preserving the Union" to "ending slavery." And deliberately escalated the crisis by dispatching a supply convoy to Fort Sumter, in order to get the South to fire first on the fort.

And all the rhetoric about fighting to make men free was clearly a lie, then, since the author of that "government of the people, by the people, for the people" line also said that he would happily rather have kept the South in the union, even if it meant not freeing any of the slaves (and when he did sign an Emancipation Proclamation, it only freed the slaves in those areas which were beyond the reach of Union forces).

More to the point, are you really going to argue that the American effort in World War II is somehow sullied by the historical facts (now known and even argued at the time) that FDR pushed the Germans towards war? That he deliberately lied to the American public about what was going on, who was doing the shooting, and the extent to which he violated the law (laws, in some cases, that he himself signed)?

Would it really have been better to have not helped the British beyond what the various Neutrality Acts allowed, in the dark days of 1940 and early 1941, when the polls made clear that Americans were not prepared to intervene, even at the cost of losing Britain to the Nazis?

Yes, perhaps at some philosophical level, it would have been better to have emphasized to everyone that the Civil War was only being fought about self-determination or not (since freeing the slaves was an afterthought), whatever the impact that might have had on foreign intervention. And perhaps it would assuage one's conscience to argue that our government would be on firmer ground if supplies were not dispatched on American merchant ships, and those supplies came only after American needs were met, in 1940. Perhaps, in an alternate-history universe, one might even conclude that, whatever the polls, FDR could have persuaded a majority of Americans to go to war prior to Pearl Harbor, rather than promising in the 1940 campaign that he would not send American boys to die in foreign wars.