In a better world, the debate about the Bush administration's intentions toward Saddam Hussein before the September 11 attacksrekindled by this week's release of Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyaltywould have been settled ages ago. The disclosure by Paul O'Neill, the former treasury secretary on whose remembrances the book is largely based, that the Bush administration was looking for ways to go after Hussein before the attacks is, in fact, hardly a disclosure at all, as anyone who'd been paying attention over the last decade would have known.
Do we really have to run through all this again? The paper trail begins not with Suskind's book but more than a decade ago, back on March 8, 1992. On that day, The New York Times ran a piece by its national-security correspondent, Patrick E. Tyler, divulging the existence of a Defense Department paper -- Dick Cheney was defense secretary at the time -- that laid out a strategy for the exercise of U.S. power in the post-Cold War world (at a point in time, remember, when Cheney fully expected to be defense secretary for the next four years). A key phrase in this paper, called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), was an assertion that the United States must be willing to take "anticipatory action to defend" itself. Reread that phrase and consider its inherent logical paradox. At any rate, it was the doctrine of preemption, in cold type, nine years before 9-11. Furthermore, in the section where the DPG speculated on which nations might be ripe for such anticipatory defense, Iraq received prominent mention.
The DPG was leaked to Tyler, as he put it in his article, by "an official who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain" (imagine that). The article caused enough of a hubbub that the first President Bush felt compelled to distance himself from it days later. Therethe controversy abated, though anyone trying to follow the thread of this argument throughout the 1990s would not have been hard-pressed to do so; the basic points of the DPG were reiterated throughout the decade in such publicly shielded and highly classified documents as The Weekly Standard.
There have been, in other words, many opportunities, before George W. Bush took office and since, for a genuinely skeptical and probing media to investigate the question of whether 9-11 was used as a pretext to launch the war against Saddam Hussein -- and, more broadly, the first phase of the new hegemony on which establishing the right of the United States to strike without direct provocation is hinged. There were scattered mentions, and even a few excellent dissections. But for the most part, anyone who posited even the possibility was dismissed as a kook. As Joshua Micah Marshall wisely observed on his blog last weekend, "Open secrets only get discussed by the press once a prominent person states them publicly."
But we never had the debate longed for by that 1992 leaker with his or her now-quaint notions. Yes, we debated the Bush doctrine after 9-11. But at that point the deck was just a little bit stacked in the administration's favor. And even then the doctrine was sold to the public only through a series of goosed allegations and evasions and manipulation of facts.
There's a school that says none of this matters. We removed a genocidal tyrant from power and it was the moral thing to do. That word, "moral," is always flashed as a conversation stopper, and it always works: Who can deny that bringing a murderer to the bar of justice is a moral act? Thus those of us who opposed the war are reduced not so much to amoral eunuchs -- although that is the rhetorical intent of some -- but to mere tacticians who place political considerations above morality.
The answer to that is that there are different sorts of morality. A government is rightly judged on two levels: the consequences of its actions on people and the world, more obviously, but also on whether those actions comport with the nation's stated ideals. There have been times in this country's history when the latter was judged more important than the former. Very few citizens, after all, were injured by the fact that one party's henchmen broke into another party's national-committee offices at the Watergate complex in June 1972. Yet that event set off a crisis precisely and only because the Nixon White House had pillaged our stated ideals.
Today, this second moral criterion has been completely tossed out the window. Nothing about the way we went to war honored this country's ideals. It was a vast shakedown front to back, and it did do damage to American democracy -- in some ways already seen and in some ways that will reveal themselves in time.
I grant to the war's supporters, such as the "liberal hawks" parleying over at Slate, that on my first criterion, a moral case for the war exists (although I worry that, given the laws of unintended consequences, time will have something to teach us about that as well). At the end of the day, the saved lives of Iraqis are no small thing to weigh against the debasement of "mere" ideals. But the latter concern deserves far more attention than it's been getting. It isn't enough for a writer or an intellectual to assert that it didn't matter what Bush's reasons for the war were; that if one had one's own reasons, those were good enough, and what this administration told the public was not, finally, relevant. And it's exactly that abnegation that prevented us from having the debate we should have had years before Paul O'Neill came along to start it.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's co-editor and executive editor.
