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| Features column, BBC News March 18, 2013 at 9:06 PM |
In this story, Taylor discusses the intelligence from the CIA and British which Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush used as the excuse for their invasion of Iraq, which led to the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. Whilst conceding that Blair might have believed the false claims that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Taylor presents evidence from British and US intelligence experts that even at the time there was good reason not to believe any such thing, and that neither Blair nor Bush were justified in believing what they did "based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies".
The "fool's gold" from the homepage heading is in the Intelligence Failure section, where Taylor quotes army General Sir Mike Jackson and Lord Butler, who led an inquiry into false WMD excuse for the war afterwards, as saying that both the British prime minister and the president of the United States deliberately deceived themselves. We presume they did this because they were both keen to go to war and looking for any excuse that would work.
Taylor is a bit more generous than I would be. I think that Bush at least told an outright lie to the American nation to get his longed for war against Saddam. He should have been impeached for that. The Iraq war was a very good re-election strategy, and before the ugly truths started to come out, Bush had already been elected for his second term in office. Thankfully, he could not get a third, and had he run, I'm sure that the American people would still have given Obama the convincing majority that elected America's first black president.
I'm actually in two minds about the war in Iraq. I do think that Saddam was a monster and that his removal and subsequent execution no bad thing (I'm not a Buddhist, so it's OK for me to think that execution can be an acceptable option), although the cost was very high diplomatically since it opened the US to charges of unjust, and even illegal, interference in the domestic affairs of another country. If it was right to attack Iraq to get rid of Saddam, then the same honest reasons would also have justified a war to oust the brutally despotic leaders of Burma and other nations where dictators suppress their citizens. But I'm not in two minds at all about the lying by those two leaders of the Western world: it was wrong.
The more interesting aspect of this messy story though is that it seems to me a good example of the evils that can so easily flow from censorship, however well intentioned that suppression of free speech might be. Censorship is always done with intent to create ignorance about the topic censored, that is, to make knowledge and a well-founded opinion impossible. This is why pornography is censored on public television - people don't want children, or even adults, to know about sex. This is why Apple censors information about its new products - it does not want them to be known before the launch, especially not by business rivals. This is also why military intelligence (OALD definition 2,, not 1.) is often censored - it would harmful were ignorance of plans and means replaced by knowledge or well-founded opinion. In at least two of these cases, I agree with the censors that ignorance is better than knowledge for most people, whose opinions on the topics where open speech is not permitted should be kept ignorant and worthless.
But in the case of WMDs in Iraq, it seems that Blair and Bush deliberately kept themselves ignorant and their opinion on an important matter worthless, and then used that wilful ignorance to deceitfully lead their nations into a very messy war, the consequences of which are still being felt. Whilst I'm sure it is often appropriate for ordinary citizens to be ignorant of military matters, it is certainly not appropriate for the leaders of a country to be so ignorant, especially not when they are deciding to go to war or not.
A little more generally, I'm also sure that knowledge is generally better than ignorance, and that an opinion of some worth is better than a worthless one, which is why citizens should always be very suspicious of censorship by their government. If free speech is being suppressed on some topic, such as a national leader, we need to ask whether it is really a good thing for citizens to be ignorant on that topic and their opinions on it rendered worthless by oppressive laws, such as blocking internet sites, or even by social sanction, which can be just as unjust and irrational as any despotic law. On the whole, I think that people's opinion's on matters of public concern should not be veiled in ignorance that must make opinion worthless.
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Still, awful president that he was, plunging the US into war, into economic disaster and into unprecedented government interference in people's lives, Bush's very narrow first election, with less votes than Gore, was democratic.
ReplyDeleteIn contrast, Abhisit's appointment as prime minister, although he might have been a more decent person, was not democratic.
Now you know my answers to the first two questions, but disagreement is welcome. I've written an answer to the first question, but I'm not happy with it and want to revise so much that it will be effectively rewritten. I haven't written the essay on Abhisit's government, but my answer follows from the same definition that makes Bush's election democratic, although I need to think a bit more about how that will work out under the revised version of the definition of the word democracy for which I will argue in the revised essay on Bush.
There was a huge effect to both the United States and the United Kingdom. Both countries spent much money and lost many soldiers in this war. President Bush wanted to kill Saddam Hussein at that time because he believed Iraq was involved with the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. The UK felt that they had to support the US even thought they had not been attacked.
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