Liars, otherwise known as the government

I ran across something over the weekend about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the presidential lie that launched the Vietnam War, and got to thinking the other day about my friend N., who used to serve in a position very close to the civilian war-making leadership in Washington. N., a staunch conservative, became disillusioned about the war fairly early on, when N. observed leaders outright lying in their public statements about what we knew was going on in Iraq. N. was seeing the same set of facts that the leaders were, and initially assumed that they must have access to other information. Eventually, though, N. came to believe that the leaders simply weren't telling the truth to the American people.

Via Dan Larison, here's some eye-opening information about Alan Foley, who headed the CIA operation making the case for Iraq's possession of WMDs. This is taken from a new book about the case for war,

"There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. 'Not much, if anything,' Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book."

So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here's the answer (p. 119):

"One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: 'If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.' The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded."

Apparently this information is not new; it's been previously reported, but not with Foley's name attached.

You will remember the Downing Street Memos from 2002, in which the British government was informed by its own diplomatic team, which had consulted with senior US officials in Washington on war planning, that ... well, read this passage:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

I believe that the Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to go to war with Iraq. I believe it decided that Iraq could be turned into a decent country if Saddam were gone, and that a regime change in Iraq would be the catalyst for a positive revolution in the Mideast. I believe the administration knowingly told whatever lies it needed to tell to win over the American people to its policy. I believe our president, for whom I voted twice, is a dishonorable man who will be ill-remembered by history. I find the manifest and catastrophic incompetence forgivable; I find the dishonor and mendacity far less so.

Last night I was reading a Robert D. Kaplan essay from the forthcoming issue of The American Interest, an advance copy of which I received yesterday. Kaplan talks about the warrior class in American life, and how perilous it is to have an Army that is asked to fight for a society that no longer believes in itself -- by which Kaplan means no longer believes there is anything worth fighting for. I don't believe that is America, and neither, it seems, does Kaplan. But it could be America. The blowback of this war on American society will be ferocious, when it gathers full strength. We have lost this war, because in truth, the war was never winnable. And the war wasn't even necessary. In the end, when the full cost of the war comes home, the American people will not forgive Bush this humiliation. But when we come to examine in Congressional hearings -- as we will in the next Democratic administration, most likely -- the lies that were told to justify this war, who can imagine what kind of loss of confidence in American authority that will result?

One very bright spot, pointed out by Kaplan: unlike in the post-Vietnam era, the American people revere and love our soldiers. Kaplan points out that the troops refuse to be seen as victims, and they resent being condescended to as such. So we should refrain. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that we sent the finest men (and women) this country has to fight a war that should never have been fought, in pursuit of a foolish policy built on deception. And now America is poorer and less secure because of it, and the Middle East is a more dangerous place than ever.

There has got to be a reckoning for this. There simply has to be. I know you've heard all this from me before, and it's a boring point by now to make, but ... damn, this is frustrating. We have got to keep fighting this war against Islamist terrorists, but the Bush administration has made trusting our leadership extremely difficult.