Casualties of War

It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth, but truth often dies long before the war begins. This is especially the case when war is painstakingly engineered by our leaders, rather than thrust upon them by the Forces of Evil. Earlier this week, Iraq took a bold step to avoid military conflict by allowing weapons inspectors immediate and unconditional access; but with enough duplicity President Bush should be back on the road to war in no time.

Many fabrications used to sell past wars to the American people are now notorious. In 1964, a Navy crew’s panicky suspicion that it had come under fire by a Vietnamese ship was within a few hours spun by President Lyndon B. Johnson into a malicious act of Communist aggression. For his lies, LBJ was rewarded with congressional authorization to escalate our fateful military adventure in Indochina. In 1990, the first President Bush employed bogus accounts of Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti newborns out of incubators to overcome the public’s unwillingness to wage war against the tyrant who had only months before been a celebrated U.S. ally.

Recent White House statements about Iraq continue this grand tradition. Despite his difficulty with the English language, Bush is spectacularly proficient in doublespeak. Consider, for example, his avowed desire to bring United Nations weapons inspectors back into Iraq. While decrying Iraq’s “decade of defiance” of U.N. resolutions, Bush has done everything in his power to ensure that Iraq continues to defy them. In July 2001, his administration refused to sign the enforcement protocol of the Biological Weapons Convention and has continued undermining negotiations since then. Earlier this summer, during talks between Iraqi and U.N. officials regarding the return of weapons inspectors, Bush was eager to reject Iraqi offers to readmit inspectors in return for the termination of economic sanctions.

As the Iraqi offers have mounted, U.S. war rhetoric has become only fiercer—exactly the opposite of what one would expect if Bush truly desired a diplomatic solution. In early August, an Iraqi envoy invited U.N. officials to Baghdad to discuss the resumption of weapons inspections. Within hours, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other White House hawks raced each other to the television cameras to promise that the U.S. would invade Iraq whether or not U.N. inspections were allowed to resume. Even as Iraq agreed on Tuesday to the unconditional readmission of weapons inspectors, the Bush administration has already attempted to sabotage the effort, calling it “a tactic that will fail” and announcing that the U.S. “is not in the business of negotiating with Saddam Hussein”—as if there were anything left to negotiate. The White House has made it clear that Iraq will not be rewarded with peace even for fully complying with its hard-line demands.

Such manipulative posturing has, up until now, served the hawks well, creating a strong disincentive for Iraq to appease any U.S. grievances. So long as Iraq fears it will be bombed to dust regardless what it does, it will probably do the worst, thus giving Bush an excuse to start a war he would have started anyway.

Bush’s doublespeak about Iraq has contributed to a uniquely Orwellian climate that leads only to war. Only in such a climate can the latest polls indicate that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has nukes while even the weapons experts in the Oval Office haven’t dared make that claim. The vice president can warn every day of the imminent threat posed by a “murderous dictator” whose oil pipelines his company made millions repairing only four years ago. The secretary of defense can accuse Iraq of supporting al Qaeda while even the CIA has denied any evidence of such a link. The president can amass troops around Iraq’s borders while assuring the public he is a patient man and hasn’t made up his mind. Iraq’s offers to readmit weapons inspectors can be dismissed as “manipulative” while U.S. attempts to avoid the renewal of inspections are reported as “diplomacy.”

The chorus of lies about Iraq that Bush’s team has assembled within the past months is not the least uncharacteristic. An administration whose very legitimacy rests on the assumption that elderly Florida Jews voted en masse for Pat Buchanan has quickly become a regime that can only be sustained on the construction of a bigger and bigger house of cards. As with Enron, big lies can yield big rewards for Bush and Company. Bush has created a distraction, just in time for congressional elections, from the wave of scandals that have rocked corporate America, the Republican agenda and Bush’s popularity. It’s a diversion from the reality that the war on terrorism, while scoring plentiful victories against Afghan villagers and the Constitution, has left Osama bin Laden and his network largely unscathed. Perhaps the biggest reward of all will be the expansion of U.S. dominance over the Arab world and the precious oil that Cheney needs to keep his heart pumping.

Despite Iraq’s desperate attempts to appease him, Bush may yet be able to snatch a war from the jaws of peace. One can only hope that, like Enron, his monstrous house of cards will collapse of its own absurdity—and that the second casualty of war will be the Bush regime.

Matthew R. Skomarovsky ’03 is a philosophy concentrator in Dudley House.