My Point Exactly
appearing in SFGATE
Lies, damned lies and ongoing dread
by Jon Carroll

WE KNOW THAT governments lie. We know that the
secretary will disavow all knowledge of our actions if
we are caught or killed. We know that the
government will say it was a weather balloon, a
training exercise, a rogue agent, an accidental
straying into territorial waters, a boiler explosion.
"Gosh, was that the Chinese Embassy? I knew we
shouldn't have depended on that Lonely Planet map."

Mostly, though, the lies that governments tell are not
to foreign governments. The lies they tell are
organizational. They are told for the purpose of
diffusing blame or deflecting criticism. They are told
so that a bureaucrat can keep his job.

The bureaucratic imperative only increases with the
age of the institution. We did not "connect the dots"
before Sept. 11 because bureaucrats did not want
the impression left that field offices were smarter than
the central office. We did not "connect the dots"
because bureaucrats were afraid of being accused of
"racial profiling." We did not connect the dots
because hiring actual speakers of Arabic would
disrupt the old-boy network.

Lies are also told to convince the voters that an
announced policy is correct. Daniel Ellsberg
participated in the lying about Vietnam for six years
before he blew the whistle. If you read between the
lines (and inside the lines, and use the special
Washington decoder to analyze the lines), there are
a lot of potential Ellsbergs in the CIA and the
Pentagon.

They know what lies are being told. Maybe one of
them will photocopy 2,000 pages of documents one
day, and we'll all know what the lies are. But
anonymous people are already waving their hands
and saying, "Honest really bad idea do something no
killing please."

Folks with a sense of history think of the days before
World War I, when everyone was sure that somebody
sensible would stop this madness and no one
sensible did, and the century of unprecedented
carnage began.

IT'S A COMIC opera, in some ways. We are planning
to invade Iraq because it might have nukes one day,
and North Korea jumps up and down and says, "We
have nukes right now, yes oh yes," and the United
States says, "Well, no more oil for you guys. Where
were we?"

Australia experiences something that had almost the
psychological force that Sept. 11 had for us, the
bombing of a nightclub in Kuta Beach (the Fort
Lauderdale of Australia, although technically in
another nation), and we say, "Terribly sorry, old
things, but how about that Saddam fellow?"

Chechen terrorists hold Russians hostage in a
Moscow theater, and administration wonks stay up
all night trying to figure out a way to blame it on Iraq.

It's like, hello, the war is over here. Worldwide Islamic
fundamentalist uprising. Saddam Hussein: not an
Islamic fundamentalist. I really think Dick Cheney
needs to learn to use Google.

IT SEEMS CLEAR that Saddam Hussein is most
dangerous when he feels threatened. Our plan:
Threaten him. It seems clear that Saddam Hussein is
isolated from negative information, living in a dream
world in which the entire world supports his
wonderfulness against the evil American empire. It is
tempting to say that the only world leader as isolated
from negative information as Saddam Hussein is
George Bush himself.

And Bush has nukes! I'm sorry, Captain, we had to
destroy Western civilization in order to save it.

The scary part is that the legislative branch of
government, the one charged by the Constitution with
protecting us from the imperial presidency, has gone
over to the other side. We don't have checks and
balances; we only have blank checks.