The lies that bind White House team to Iraq

The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious.

It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President George W. Bush in justifying his pre-emptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud.

The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again, we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in pre-emptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana.

For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our country while devastating three others, check out filmmaker Errol Morris' new documentary, The Fog Of War, in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake.

Today, we again have been battered senseless by the argument that it is "irresponsible" to leave Iraq, even when it is clear we are no longer welcome. Those who dare suggest that our continued presence as an occupier is actually part of the problem — like Democratic presidential contender Dennis Kucinich — are pilloried as unrealistic.

But attempting to alter other people's history — while also serving our own economic and political needs — leads almost inevitably to quagmire, blowback and a nonsensical path of trying to make future truth of past lies: We didn't go to Iraq to save it, but now we have to save it to excuse the fact that we went.

This tangled web is no less onerous when spun by Republicans Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney than by Democrats Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

And now, as then, in the early stages of the war, we saw only the most tepid opposition from the political and media elites to the big-lie technique that so often accompanies war.

"We have a more important job to do in Iraq ... and that is to help the Iraqi people build a free and democratic country," Wolfowitz said last weekend.

If this was the goal all along, why didn't Wolfowitz and Bush tell the American people before they sacrificed their sons and daughters to the crusade?

What was all that about the imminent threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to 9/11? All lies, it turns out.

--- Robert Scheer