Americans adjust their attitudes toward truth as virtue
By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published June 8, 2003
TALLAHASSEE - Regardless of their politics, people everywhere value the principle that the end doesn't justify the means. You can't do bad things even if you mean well. Or so it was taught to me as a child.
This is the value that accounts for the Fifth Amendment, which says the government can't make someone confess to being a criminal even if it turns out to be true. There had been too much bitter experience with the rack and thumbscrew.
But is it a bad thing for the government to lie if the outcome is a good thing? Is a lie ever proper?
Most people would say no, but then we fudge. A "harmless" lie is okay if it spares someone's feelings - as in "Of course that new outfit looks nice." Not so with lying to protect yourself. Lying to hurt someone else is the worst; it's the only lie explicitly forbidden by a religious commandment.
Our national attitude about lying used to be framed by the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. It was a complete fiction by the hagiographer Mason Weems. Generations of Americans suspended disbelief because it expressed the sort of absolute virtue we wanted in our presidents.
We have long since ceased to expect it, however, which ought to be a matter of greater regret than it seems to be. Richard Nixon lied. Bill Clinton lied. And now that we have gotten used to it, not so many people seem to be as troubled as they should be by the suggestion that President Bush lied to justify making war on Iraq.
I do not think he did. I don't think Tony Blair did. I think that they believed what they were saying, though the possibility that other people lied to them (as Robert McNamara lied to Lyndon Johnson) looms larger with each day that fails to produce the weapons of mass destruction that were the stated reason for going to war.
In their absence, the American and British governments have an enormous credibility issue that will hobble their diplomacy worldwide, with potentially dangerous consequences for the next time we cry wolf. What if the next time is real?
There would still be a problem even if it turned out that Washington and Whitehall were wrong but believed sincerely that they were right. That would point to an intelligence breakdown as serious as the failure to detect the 9/11 conspiracy. With nuclear weapons proliferating once again, it's as dangerous to raise false alarms as to raise no alarms. This is what is so ominous in the allegations that the spooks were pressured - or "politicized" as some put it - into saying what Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Bush wanted to hear.
In the city named for the man who supposedly could not tell a lie, the present government recognizes its serious credibility problem. But where it should be preparing simply to say, "We were wrong," a spin is taking shape: It doesn't matter whether we were right or wrong, because getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing to do. If he didn't actually have the weapons, he had them once before and could have had them again. If he wasn't actually a threat to us, he could have been. Or as the president himself expressed it to the troops in Qatar Thursday, "One thing is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more."
There's no question that the human race is better off with Hussein dead or neutralized. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times argues persuasively, as he did before the war, that there were "right reasons" and "moral reasons" to dispose of the merciless tyrant without regard to the "stated reason" that he was an immediate threat to the security of the United States. But even Friedman acknowledges that should it turn out that Bush faked the stated reason, "that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter."
Would Congress have consented to the right reasons? Probably not. But if the war had been premised on moral justice instead of self-defense, we might have been better prepared to win it. As things stand now, we have exchanged tyranny for anarchy. A lot of Iraqis don't think it's an improvement.
If we don't need to claim self-defense to fight a moral war, why isn't Fidel Castro sweating bullets? His Soviet protectors are long gone; so is Washington's respect for old agreements. Yet Castro seems in fear of nothing but his own dissidents.
Here's a theory: Sugar - American sugar - is his insurance policy.
"They guard him 24 hours around the clock," says Nat Reed, the Florida environmentalist. It's a joke, he admits, but it makes a point about a problem Washington wouldn't want. A post-Castro Cuba would look to the United States to buy its sugar, for which there would be a huge lobby among the Cuban-Americans upon whom Florida's electoral votes and the presidency depend. Domestic price supports would have to fall, it would no longer pay to grow sugar in South Florida, and the battle of the Everglades would finally be won.
