QandO

June 23, 2004

Knowing better
Posted by Jon Henke

Kevin Drum...

Matt Yglesias makes the case today that the Bush administration doesn't actually lie most of the time. Rather, if you parse their words with hyper-precision, you'll see that technically they're telling the truth even if it's plain to a four-year-old that their intent is to mislead and deceive. [...] Let's take this statement from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press last year:

If we're successful in Iraq...we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.

Each phrase, then, is technically accurate. Taken as a whole, though, it's obvious that his intent was to imply that Iraq was a primary base for al-Qaeda's activities, which is clearly untrue.

As Matthew Yglesias argues, a "canny speaker can mislead his audience without necessarily saying anything false" - which, he says, is what the Bush administration did. As evidence, he cites a Bush statement...

"the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world."

Pretty damning stuff. If, of course, you accept Kevin and Matt's assumption about the implications and beliefs of the Bush administration. And if you don't? They don't say.

The problem is this: their assumptions go directly to motivation - a subject about which both Kevin and Matt are making wild-ass guesses. And not just wild-ass guesses, but unfair wild-ass guesses.

Kevin does not, for example, mention the possibility that Dick Cheney could consider Al Qaeda a "global network of relationships, a system for transforming the frustrations and discontents of Islam-natives, marginalized immigrants, the militant sons of immigrants-into a violent expression of jihad" providing "connectivity, training, and financial support to an extensive galaxy of terrorists enterprises, stretching from North Africa to the southern Philippines".
- From the Statement of Brian Jenkins to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States March 31, 2003.

As such, it's nearly irrelevant where the head of the network is located. If, as the 9/11 Commission found, "Bin Laden sought to build a broader Islamic Army that included terrorist groups from Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Oman, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Somalia, and Eritrea" and "at least one [group] from each did", then Iraq is as much a part of the loose network of terrorism-supporting regions as any other. Perhaps moreso, considering the unstable, warlike nature of the Hussein regime and the uncertain nature of their WMD capabilities.

It seems pretty obvious that Dick Cheney recognizes--and believes in--this paradigm. Does Kevin Drum believe it? Well, it hardly matters. What matters--for the purposes of the debate he's having--is the argument and assumptions that Cheney brings to the table. Drum and Yglesias would, apparently, rather argue with a different set of definitions.

The problem with this is that we can never have a serious argument about a very important topic - we can never debate the arguments the Bush administration makes - if their critics dismiss the arguments they make, and assign them entirely different arguments. Arguments based on assumptions about their motivations. In short, strawmen.

You don't have to agree with the assumptions Cheney makes, but you do have to argue with them. And, for the record, the same thing will apply if John Kerry is elected President. No matter how much we may disagree with a position, argue the merits. Assuming motivations is just...weak. It's the product of echo-chamber discourse.

Matt and Kevin should know better.

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