It Ain't Lyin' If...

By Matthew Yglesias, The American Prospect. Posted June 23, 2004.

The recent debate over Iraq's alleged relationship with al-Qaeda has led the media into a semantic quagmire: Are "connections" the same as "collaboration?" What about "control?" It's reminiscent of similar debates as to whether the administration ever called the Iraqi threat "imminent" or merely "immediate."

I studied philosophy in college, which I never thought would come in handy in any sort of professional pursuit. In the course of doing so, however, I did take several courses on the subject of semantics and studied Paul Grice's theory of "conversational implicature." As aptly summarized by Kent Bach, the point is this:

What a speaker implicates is distinct from what he says and from what his words imply. Saying of an expensive dinner, "It was edible," implies that it was mediocre at best. This simple example illustrates a general phenomenon: A speaker can say one thing and manage to mean something else or something more by exploiting the fact that he may be presumed to be cooperative, in particular, to be speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and otherwise appropriately. The listener relies on this presumption to make a contextually driven inference from what the speaker says to what she means.

For our purposes, the point is that a canny speaker can mislead his audience without necessarily saying anything false. If I tell you, "They're not all in the meeting yet" when, in fact, no one is in the meeting, I haven't lied to you about anything. If no one is there, then, indeed, they're not all there. Nevertheless, any reasonable listener will have understood me to mean that some, but not all, of the expected attendees are then. Again, if I say, "Some people are in the room" when only one person is in the room, I'm not speaking falsely, I'm simply speaking uncooperatively. You'll infer that more than one person is in the room although, strictly speaking, I said no such thing.

Bill Clinton, who has also returned to the news cycle lately, gave us a particularly elegant example. Queried under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and wishing neither to perjure himself nor admit to having conducted an affair, he stated that there "is no sexual relationship" with her. This was true. At the time he uttered the phrase, there was no sexual relationship between the two. The purpose of saying this, however, was quite clearly to get the prosecutors to believe that he had denied that there ever was an affair, which was false.

For the purposes of defending oneself against perjury charges in a quasi-criminal proceeding, this sort of argument may suffice. In Bush's case, however, perjury is not on the table. Rather, the question is whether or not he has led the American people in a responsible manner. In this context the important issue is not whether the administration's various claims can, when taken one by one, somehow be defined as factual. The relevant question is whether or not the picture they sketched enhanced or detracted from the public's understanding of the major issues of the day. Various assertions about ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda must, therefore, be put into the broader context of what the administration was saying about the war. This broad picture included the claim that the invasion of Iraq was an act of preemptive self-defense, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States, that the Iraq War was part of the war on terrorism, that the desire to invade was motivated by the sense that the country had waited too long before responding vigorously to al-Qaeda, and that the lessons of 9-11 were an important factor in the president's thought process.

The point of all this was to lead the American people to believe that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terrorism in a rather straightforward sense: Saddam Hussein was likely to give al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction for use against the United States. Though many voices put forward many arguments for war in the months before the beginning of the invasion, this was the main case put forward by the administration. Not that we needed to invade to avenge a meeting that took place years ago in Khartoum, but that the long-past Khartoum meeting was evidence of the continuing likelihood that Iraq would become a WMD supplier for al-Qaeda.

Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect writing fellow

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