| Benjamin R. Barber
Published in the Los
Angeles Times, February 5, 2003
The Bush administration is releasing small pieces of intelligence
in dribs and drabs to make its circumstantial case for war with
Iraq. Hints were dropped in the State of the Union message, and
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell promises more at the Security
Council today.
In making the case for war, there is one thing on which President
Bush and his critics agree: It's all about trust. The leaders of
eight European countries who signed on to the war effort in a commentary
in the Wall Street Journal and European papers last week didn't
make a judgment on the evidence; they argued that history and the
North Atlantic alliance demanded that Europe trust America.
But if the case for war rests on trust, there are good reasons why
this president, like any powerful democratic leader, needs to be
distrusted.
First, healthy republican democracy was founded and thrives on a
fundamental distrust of power. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of
Rights enshrine that principle. In Federalist Paper 51, James Madison
notes the "great importance in a republic" of guarding
society "against the oppression of its rulers," while
the Constitution's most impressive devices, from checks and balances
to an independent judiciary, reflect distrust of concentrated power.
Thomas Jefferson opposed the idea of a presidential State of the
Union message, saying it reeked of a "speech from the throne."
Modern-day Republicans often campaign on the premise that Americans
should not trust "big government," but they quickly forget
their reservations once they win big elections.
Some people argue that war attenuates the case for distrust. Yet
war and truth are not a good match. Presidents have manipulated,
edited and at times perverted the truth -- usually, to be sure,
to obtain popular and congressional support of what they believed
were worthy ends. The Gulf of Tonkin affair, in which a largely
fabricated story of attacks on American war vessels was employed
to stampede Congress into support for a major escalation of the
Vietnam War, comes to mind. Or the sinking of the battleship Maine
by what may have been (but was never confirmed as) a Spanish mine
in Havana Harbor in 1898, an event used by President McKinley to
help bring the country into a war with Spain over its colonies.
Or President Eisenhower's prevarications about the U-2 incident
and President Nixon's about the Cambodia incursion.
Every president believes he is being "honest" at some
deeper level when misleading us to rationalize a war he thinks vital
to national interests. That's his job. Ours, however, is to distrust
him on crucial matters of war and peace until hard proof is on the
table.
Bush imagines it is enough in making the case for a preventive war
against Iraq to assure the world that "we exercise power without
conquest, we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers." But we
must ask for more: for hard intelligence, facts contradicting the
sanguine views of the inspectors and showing that Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein really possesses weapons of mass destruction or has the
means and the intentions to acquire them fast.
We cannot accept a refusal to reveal intelligence because it may
"endanger" sources. In our democracy, the need to protect
intelligence sources must be trumped by the public's right to know.
To have his war, the president must prove his case to the American
people and show what Jefferson called "a decent respect to
the opinions of mankind" by making a public case that is more
than merely inferential or circumstantial. This will be the challenge
faced by Powell at the Security Council.
In his State of the Union, the president referred repeatedly to
the old and empty warheads found Jan. 16 as evidence of Hussein's
plans to use chemical and biological agents. But in an interview
last week, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said "no
trace" of chemical or biological elements had been found either
in the old warheads or anywhere else. Secretary Powell?
Powell has suggested that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving
illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery,
but Blix said his inspectors had found no evidence for such incidents.
Secretary Powell?
Many experts have said there is a far greater chance of Al Qaeda
receiving weapons of mass destruction from the North Koreans or
even the nuclear-armed Pakistanis than from Iraq. Secretary Powell?
We know we cannot trust Hussein or North Korea's Kim Jong II. But
total distrust of tyrants does not entail the corollary of total
trust in Bush. Americans have embraced the motto "in God we
trust," not "in presidents we trust." They have placed
their faith in a republican form of government that questions and
limits power. That is the difference between Iraq and the United
States.
Benjamin R. Barber is the author of "Jihad vs. McWorld"
(Ballantine,
2002) and is completing a critical study of preventive war in an
age of
terrorism, due from Norton this summer. He is the Gershon and Carol
Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and
a
Principal of The Democracy Collaborative.
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