Mendacity Under Fire

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda," U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters last week, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda."

This is what logicians call a tautology, or a "useless repetition," as the dictionary defines it, but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it finds itself enmeshed.

Repetition and blaming the media, an old standby, of which Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld are particularly fond dating back to their service under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 30 years ago, are back in vogue.

Thus it was that Cheney, the most aggressive administration proponent of the theory that Saddam Hussein had not only been working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden for years, but that he was also behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York back in 1993, complained that New York Times coverage of the 9/11 Commission's finding that there was no such link was "outrageous" and probably "malicious."

And thus it was that Rumsfeld charged that media coverage of the abuses of detainees held by the U.S. in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere was not only wrong, but dangerous. "The implication that's out there is the United States government is engaging in torture as a matter of policy, and that's not true," he declared, despite the cascading leaks of Pentagon, Justice Department, and White House memoranda suggesting ways in which domestic and international bans on torture can be circumvented or ignored in the "war on terror."

And, in a distinct echo of the charges leveled by diehard hawks over the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam under the Nixon/Ford watch, he suggested that reporters and editors, "sitting in an air-conditioned room some place," not the military (and certainly not the policymakers) would be to blame if Washington lost in Iraq.

"This much is certain," he said Thursday. "Coalition forces cannot be defeated on the battlefield. The only way this effort could fail is if people were to be persuaded that the cause is lost, or that it's not worth the pain -- or if those who seem to measure progress in Iraq against a more perfect world convince others to throw in the towel."

The tactic on which the administration appears to have settled in dealing with what is clearly an unraveling of whatever shred of credibility it retains is simply to insist -- as it has for so long anyway -- that it never made any mistakes or exaggerated or misrepresented or lied about anything in any way, and to hope that, if it repeats itself sufficiently loudly and often, people will come to believe it.

"At this point, the White House position is just frankly bizarre," Daniel Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official in the Clinton White House, told the Los Angeles Times in response to Bush's declaration about Al Qaeda and Hussein. "They're just repeating themselves, rather than admit they were wrong."

Bush, of course, was responding to the finding by the bipartisan 9/11 commission that, while bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" when he was based in Sudan through 1994, "Iraq apparently never responded," and no "collaborative relationship" was ever established.

Proceeding from his tautology, Bush insisted that "this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda."

That rendition, of course, raises a host of questions, among them definitional -- does the existence of "numerous contacts" amount to a "relationship," particularly when one side fails to respond to the other?