Neo-Cons and the Noble Lie - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

kerry · #1 10-18-2003, 09:05 PM

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp

One of John's fellow Albertan's explains the elitist political philosophy of some of the current US right wing.

Botnst · #2 10-18-2003, 09:15 PM

First paragraph turn-off.

With that as an opening hypothesis, "everybody knows XXX, therefore YYY", the rest is probably equally foolish. Waste of time to read further.

Would there be an objective analysis in the house?

kerry · #3 10-18-2003, 09:24 PM

Am I missing something?

mikemover · #4 10-20-2003, 12:36 AM

"What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq. "

I think that is the paragraph in question. Who says it's "widely recognized"? Him? Who else? I don't recall ANYTHING about any of the administration's "reasons" that has been PROVEN to be a lie. All I've heard is speculation and accusation and indignation. Was there missing or incomplete or inaccurate information in the mix? Possibly...I'll even go along with "likely." But has any DELIBERATE LYING been proven, or even strongly supported by any circumstancial evidence? No.

This guy starts off by immediately making a completely undocumented and unprovable statement, so I don't have much use for the rest of his "conspiracy theory" either.

Mike

Kuan · #5 10-20-2003, 08:42 AM

Well premises don't have to be true for the argument to be valid

TT for implication:

Code:

P Q  P->Q
T T   T
T F   F
F T   T
F F   T

kerry · #6 10-20-2003, 09:06 AM

I haven't reread the piece but I understood that reference to be in regard to the statements by the Bush administration. I believe it was Wolfowitz who stated that they were searching for publically acceptable reasons for the war (or some similiar statement). If this is what they were doing, they obviously had other privately acceptable reasons that wouldn't fly with the public so they were seeking to deceive the public by using reasons which the public would find compelling.

Botnst · #7 10-20-2003, 09:09 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kuan
Well premises don't have to be true for the argument to be valid

TT for implication:

Code:

P Q P->Q T T T T F F F T T F F T

So what? A valid argument is a formalism, validity of argument does not establish the verity of the conclusion, only that certain outcomes are possible.

The only case in which a proposition is proved is the first: A valid argument with true premises cannot have a false conclusion.

Thus, the author may have proposed a valid argument, but it is unsound. Its a polemicist trick, not an exploration for truth. Its a time waster: may as well listen to Limbaugh for that level of "truth"....when he gets out of rehab.

kerry · #8 10-20-2003, 09:25 AM

Botnst:
I think your missing something important here. The point is that Leo Strauss is the darling political philosopher of the right. He was an elitist who argued in favor of political leaders using the Noble Lie. It is surely important to think about whether our political leaders think it is good to lie to us or not? Perhaps I am mistaken.

Botnst · #9 10-20-2003, 09:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by kerry edwards
Botnst:
I think your missing something important here. The point is that Leo Strauss is the darling political philosopher of the right. He was an elitist who argued in favor of political leaders using the Noble Lie. It is surely important to think about whether our political leaders think it is good to lie to us or not? Perhaps I am mistaken.

Under extremely rare circumstances, political lying may be necessary--national security, ongoing operations, etc. Much better is the Rumsfeldian approach of saying something like, "I'm just not going to answer that kind of question." It is important to differentiate between a lie and providing information that later turns out to be false.

Here's my problem with the whole lying debate. It assumes that Bush and Blair governments are so stupid that they would tell a lie to get us in a war when they know the assertions would be verifiable at a later date--after the war. That doesn't at all follow the disciplined, careful orchestration of governance that either administration has consistently displayed. A violation of that pattern of this magnitude is just not reasonable to me. I'm not saying that they couldn't have lied, they're miserable, fallible humans. I just need more convincing than what some polemicist spewing vitriol for a buck coughs-up.

kerry · #10 10-20-2003, 10:17 AM

Now I am absoutely convinced you are missing something. The article isn't about lying in the war on Iraq. It's about Strauss' political philosophy and how it is elitist, Platonic, and ultimately Nietzschean. I would think that both you and Mike would be opposed to Strauss because of your libertarian ideas of small government and a democracy based on property rights. According to the piece, Strauss railed against Lockean social contract theories of government.

Botnst · #11 10-20-2003, 10:21 AM

Like I said in my original post: first paragraph turn-off. The author begins with a foolish assumption presented as fact. I read no further.

Botnst · #12 10-20-2003, 10:25 AM

Okay. I read some of the interview.

Both the interviewer and Drury have a foregone conclusion which they then set-about to prove is a natural outcome of a certain political philosophy.

Underwhelmed by the insight.

Honus · #13 10-21-2003, 05:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Botnst
Here's my problem with the whole lying debate. It assumes that Bush and Blair governments are so stupid that they would tell a lie to get us in a war when they know the assertions would be verifiable at a later date--after the war.

It assumes no such thing because lying is a proven effective means of getting your way. Your argument assumes that a significant percentage of the voting public realizes that Bush has lied and that a significant percentage of those people is bothered by his lies. I think both assumptions are incorrect. I don't know how Bush sleeps at night, but I would never question his political success.

Honus · #14 10-21-2003, 05:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mikemover
But has any DELIBERATE LYING been proven, or even strongly supported by any circumstancial evidence? No.

Mike

I assume that you are referring to the prewar period, so I will limit my response to prewar lies and probable lies. You can question, I suppose, whether these are proven lies, but direct and circumstantial evidence strongly supports the view that they are:

Lie: "We believe in fact that he has reconstituted nuclear weapons." VP Cheney on Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.

Lie: ""The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." GW Bush, 2003 State of the Union.

Lie: Regarding the high-strength aluminum tubes, Condileeza Rice said, "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." I am not sure when this came out, but it was repeated often before the war. There was good reason to suspect that they might be part of a planned nuclear program, but the "only really suited" part is a lie. Moreover, there was little or no other evidence of an active effort to make nuclear weapons.

Lie: In his UN presentation, Colin Powell embellished the translated transcriptions of the intercepted cell phone conversations between Iraqi officers to make them appear more sinister. I have no idea whether Powell thought the translations were accurate, but someone affiliated with the administration probably knew that what he was saying was untrue.

Misleading at best: "We know he's got ties with al Qaeda" GW Bush at a November 2002 election rally. In addition to being misleading, this statement also reveals Bush's divisive approach. While his father waited until after the mid-term elections before calling for a vote on the first Gulf War, W's people went to great lengths to make the Iraq issue as partisan as possible to gain political advantage in 2002 elections. Didn't Chief of Staff Card say something like, "When you bring out a new product, you don't do it in August"?

Misleading at best: "He's a threat because he is dealing with al-Qaida." GW Bush referring to Saddam, November 7, 2002.

Multiple lies: "In a September 7 press conference with Prime Minister Blair, Bush leaned on what he called a report from the International Atomic Energy Commission, based on Hussein's nixing of inspections in 1998. "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied—access, a report came out...that they were six months away from developing a weapon," the president said. "I don’t know what more evidence we need." But then commission said that no such document exists. "There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency," said Mark Gwozdecky, head of the group. Asked why Bush referred to an apparently imaginary document, the White House claimed he was really talking about a report from 1991. But Gwozdecky told Reuters no paper to that effect was issued by his agency in 1991, either. When someone pointed out that the agency said no such thing Ari wrote a letter to the editor saying that Bush got the wrong agency and that he really meant this other agency’s report. Unfortunately for Ari, the report he cited came out after Bush’s lie."

Lie: Powell told a Senate committee that they would soon hear tape recordings of bin Laden that demontrated a "partnership" between Saddam and al Qaida. The tapes that came out later that same day have bin Laden urging followers to fight the US and the "infidel" Saddam. Some partnership.

Classic Rumsfeldian misleading: The coalition of the willing "is larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War in 1991." I guess this one might have been post-war, I am not sure, but it is a bunch of baloney whenever it was said. Like a lot of what Rumsfeld says, it is technically true, but entirely misleading. As I recall, the coalition of the willing included three countries that contributed in a meaningful fashion when the statement was made (US, Great Britain, and Spain) and a bunch of countries whose "commitment" included such things as receiving payment in return for permitting their name to be included on the list of coalition members.

Here's a post-war doozy that I cannot resist including: “The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.” GW Bush, July 25, 2003

There are others, but these are the ones I have handy.

Honus · #15 10-21-2003, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mikemover
But has any DELIBERATE LYING been proven, or even strongly supported by any circumstancial evidence? No.

Mike

Bush's lies and non-lie lies are not limited to Iraq, either. An example of a non-lie lie was the administration's claim that its tax package would save families an average of $1,100 or something like that. If you averaged it out, sure enough, the administration's number was accurate but meaningless. It would be like saying that Bill Gates would save $1,000,000 on his taxes and I would save $2.00 on mine. That averages out to $500,001 in savings per taxpayer. Wow! What a great deal.

The non-lie lies bother me more than the actual lies because they are the product of a concerted effort to mislead. By contrast, many of the actual lies seem to be the product of some sort of psychosis. For example, when Cheney told Tim Russert before the war that "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," and after the war that by striking Iraq we struck the "geographic base" of the people who attacked us on 9/11, he not only knew those statements were false, he knew that Tim Russert knew that he knew they were false. Apparently he also knew that Russert would be too lame to follow up on those obvious lies. Cheney goes beyond dishonest and deeply into weird.