President Bush said

in his January State of the Union Address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium

in Africa—an extraordinarily important charge that could justify a preemptive

war (on the assumption that Iraq would only need uranium for nuclear weapons).

According to today’s Washington

Post, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "said Secretary

of State Colin L. Powell did not include the uranium allegation in the speech

he gave to the United Nations on Feb. 5, eight days after the president spoke.

She said that was because [the State Department] had questioned the matter."

This suggests to me that top Administration officials realized before Feb. 5 that

the State of the Union speech had included a dubious, but extremely significant,

assertion. Why then did they not issue a statement casting at least partial doubt

on the uranium story? Failure to withdraw a false claim of such enormous magnitude

seems to me deeply unethical. It was not nearly enough to refrain from repeating

the charge.

My Maryland colleagues at the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) recently released a national survey concerning Americans’ attitudes toward Iraq. I thought these were the highlights:

62 percent of Americans think that the US government was at least somewhat misleading about weapons of mass destruction. But 58 percent still believe that Saddam had wmd’s before we invaded.

71 percent think that before the war, the US government implied that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

52 percent think that we have found evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link, and 23 percent believe that we have found wmd’s in Iraq. The latter figure has fallen, however, since May.

53 percent think that the post-war process is not going well.

80 percent think we have a responsibility to stay in Iraq and reconstruct the country.

It seems to me that if no wmd’s are found, no link to al Qaeda is discovered, and the postwar reconstruction process remains troubled, then public support for the war will likely erode.

Even living under the USA Patriots Act and in a state of semi-permanent war, I am not worried about what Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the moderns.” Indeed, after last week’s expansion of privacy rights by the Supreme Court, I think that this form of freedom continues to expand as a result of deep cultural trends. I am, however, concerned about what Constant called the “liberty of the ancients.”

I’m referring to his De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes (1819), in which Constant defines the “liberty of the moderns” as: “for each, the right to be subjected to nothing but laws, to have no possibility of being arrested, detained, executed, or maltreated in any way as a result of the arbitrary will of one or many individuals: It is for each the right to state his opinion, to choose his business and work in it, to dispose of his property, to take advantage of the same; to come and go without obtaining permission, and without explaining his reasons and itinerary. It is, for each, the right to associate with other individuals, whether to confer about their own interests, to profess the religion that he and his associates prefer, or simply to pass days or hours in a manner that fits his inclinations, his fantasies. Finally, it is the right, for each one, to influence the administration of the Government, whether via the nomination of some or all officials, or via representations, petitions, demands that the authority is more or less obligated to take into consideration.

“Compare now the liberty of the ancients. That consists of exercising collectively, but directly, many parts of absolute sovereignty, [and the right] to deliberate, in a public space, about war and peace, to ratify treaties of alliance with foreigners, to vote laws, pronounce decisions, examine the accounts, actions, and management of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to accuse them, to condemn or acquit them.”

[This is my hasty translation; double-check it before you use it.]

It is the liberty of the ancients that appears threatened—that

we seem to hold cheap—when we ignore charges that the Bush Administration

misled American citizens about its reasons for the Iraq war. According to the

New

York Times, Bush aides are not worried about complaints that they lied

or misled the public, “because people understand that the world is better

off without Saddam Hussein.” The world is better off (so far, at least).

However, if the public is willing to be misled, then we citizens have forfeited

our right to exercise our national sovereignty collectively, because we have refused

to “deliberate, in a public space, about war and peace.” To borrow Constant’s

language, it is time for us to “examine the accounts, actions, and management

of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to accuse them,

to condemn or acquit them.” Otherwise, we may be free as individuals, but

we are not a free people.

Those who believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (wmd’s) before the 2003 invasion are now citing the host of Western leaders from various parties and countries who publicly charged Iraq with possessing chemical and biological weapons and working on a nuclear program. This list includes Bill Clinton, Hans Blix, and Tony Blair as well as various neoconservatives. If these people were all making up evidence, the conspiracy was amazingly broad and well-organized.

But it needn’t have been a conspiracy, or anything deliberate and insidious.

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Why distinguish between weapons of mass destruction and conventional weapons, since the latter can be much more destructive? (Compare a modern air bombing campaign with the use of sarin in the Tokyo Metro system, which killed just a handful of people). Some think that this distinction is simply a self-serving rule imposed by countries, such as the United States, that have tremendous advantages in conventional weaponry. But I think there is a good reason for the taboo on weapons of mass destruction (which has actually kept respectable nations from using them since Nagasaki). Human beings have a tendency to use dubious tactics past the point where they are justified. This happens in “arms race” situations, when each party uses its enemy’s behavior to justify doing a little bit worse in return. It also happens when one party reasons that x + 1 units of some dubious behavior are not much worse than x units, which would be OK. By this reasoning, one can gradually justify any amount of the questionable behavior.

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