Prior to the commencement of a jury trial, prospective jurors are screened to insure they can make a fair and impartial determination of guilt without allowing preconceived notions or biases to interfere with their task. Our constitutional framework deems the decision to adjudge another man or woman’s guilt too important to be undertaken by individuals who are unable to fairly and impartially evaluate evidence. That’s because the stakes are too high for both the accused and for the safety of our society. During the testimony portion of a trial, witnesses are also cross-examined by attorneys to question the basis of their knowledge, to probe for inconsistencies in their testimony, to uncover motives to lie and to reveal prejudices and biases that thwart the search for the truth.
The same principles should have been applied when former President George W. Bush made the decision to go to war in Iraq. Ever since America and its allies invaded Iraq and found that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was not a threat to America’s safety, people have debated whether President Bush lied to the American people about the decision to go to war. Diehard liberals felt he did. Diehard conservatives maintain that he did not. It’s also possible that the truth lies somewhere in the nebulous middle.
Diehard beliefs aside, one question Americans should be asking is whether President Bush allowed his own personal prejudices and biases to interfere with his ability to make a fair and impartial evaluation of the evidence about Saddam Hussein and Iraq that was set before him. Did those prejudices override his ability to think critically?
The decision to send hundreds of young men and women to their death in a war zone, not to mention causing the death of thousands of innocent civilians in the process, demanded strict scrutinizing of any evidence used to justify the determination to go to war. Preconceived prejudices and biases had no legitimate place in the midst of such a review when the lives of countless individuals were at stake.
That President Bush had preconceived notions and prejudices cannot be denied. Saddam Hussein once supported a plot to kill the President’s father. Barely weeks after taking office in his inaugural State of the Union message the President labeled Iraq and Saddam in particular as part of an “axis of evil” that America must confront. Paul O’Neill, a widely respected member of the President’s cabinet confirmed that at the first national security meeting after he took the oath of office, President Bush’s focus was finding evidence against Iraq. Regardless of the wisdom of the subsequent invasion, it is clear that Iraq was in the President’s cross-hairs from day one. Mind you, I’m not saying President Bush’s prejudices were unreasonable, only that they existed.
Is it reasonable for the son of a murder victim to sit on the jury adjudicating the murder suspect’s guilt? Of course, not! That’s because it’s widely recognized that the judgments of people are often clouded by their prejudices, biases and preconceived notions.
In the bloody aftermath of the war in Iraq, we now know that the assumptions used to justify the war were false and the evidence used to make those assumptions deeply flawed. That finding was not just made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. A Republican controlled Senate Committee reached the same conclusion.
However, just because former President Bush relayed information to the American people, later found to be false, does not necessarily mean he lied. A lie is making a statement one knows to be untrue. Many Bush supporters argued that the President was simply duped by bureaucrats who overstated intelligence and provided skewed analysis. They maintained that the President actually believed what he said was true and therefore, he did not lie. It’s a good point worth remembering. I’ll explain why later.
Supporters of President Bush also applauded him as a man of decisive action. Granted, decisiveness is a valuable leadership skill, but many a leader has led his subjects down the path of ruin when critical analysis was abandoned in favor of what was labeled decisive. The head of a pack of lemmings that leads his group over a cliff is no doubt decisive, but his followers are not spared the fatal consequences of that decisiveness. The battlefields of history are littered with the remains of those who acted first without thinking.
One of the beauties of a democracy and our republic in particular, is that it affords its citizens the right to choose their own leaders. In the 2000 presidential election the winner was a perennial C-student who boasted afterwards to an English reporter that he wasn’t being paid to think in nuances, but rather to tell the American people what he believed. If that’s the case, President Bush essentially confirmed that Americans lowered the intellectual bar when they voted for him, a man who didn’t think, but just talked.
It shouldn’t have surprised anybody then that President Bush was either unwilling or intellectually unable to ask the critical questions necessary to properly evaluate the evidence about Iraq laid out before him, or to determine that the assumptions being made by his underlings were flawed. In President Bush’s mind, he wasn’t being paid to engage in critical thinking or ask questions, he was only paid to let the American people know what was on his mind! That’s why when then C.I.A. director George Tenet told the President that the evidence on Iraq was, “a slam dunk”, the President didn’t bother to ask why.
Millions of Americans were willing to risk their lives and the lives of their children on President Bush’s lack of thought and inquisition. They wanted a president who didn’t think and just talked. Just for the record, I wasn’t one of them!
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