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Of Course the Iraq War Was Sold Dishonestly

One doesn't have to fabricate something out of thin air to lie about what the evidence shows.
061215-D-7203T-182
The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, left U.S. Secretary of Defense, talks to U.S. President George W. Bush, center, and U.S. Vice President Richard B. Cheney, during his farewell parade at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., on Dec. 15, 2006. (DoD photo by Cherie A. Thurlby) (Released)

Philip Stephens has an odd understanding of what lying is:

[Blair] exaggerated the intelligence, notably in the dossier produced in September 2002, but did not make it up [bold mine-DL].

If someone takes ambiguous and unclear evidence of something and then insists that it definitively proves something to be true, that is dishonest. It requires taking something that isn’t or may not be the case and presenting it as indisputable fact. That is what Blair and Bush (and Cheney and many others) did many times in 2002 and later. One doesn’t have to fabricate something out of thin air to lie about what the evidence shows. To say that Blair “exaggerated the intelligence…but did not make it up” misses the point that the exaggeration was a deliberate misrepresentation. That was done to make people believe that there was cause for war when there wasn’t. Twisting and distorting evidence to suit one’s purpose are deceitful behaviors. A person may be driven to twist and distort evidence by a conviction that his faulty conclusion must be true, but it is still dishonest.

We rightly assume politicians lie about all sorts of things, but for some reason many people are deeply averse to the idea that they would lie about something as important as a cause for war. It seems to me that we assume good faith on the part of our leaders in these cases because the alternative is so disturbing, but I’m not sure why people cling to this misplaced confidence in leaders when the facts don’t warrant it. Even if Bush and Blair hadn’t misrepresented the evidence and misled their respective publics, that wouldn’t have made the decision to invade any better or more defensible. Even if they hadn’t sold the war dishonestly, they would still be responsible for far more horrible wrongdoing than lying. Nonetheless, it is important not to forget that this is what they did in order to rally public support behind their unnecessary and reckless war.

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