WHY LIE?

Spending the past couple of weeks in the southern end of Japan, far from the NY Times and CNN and the daily tit-for-tat of the blogosphere, was like stepping however briefly off the world. Much of the news of that period just swept by, and I was as utterly indifferent to it as it always is to me. It was freeing, and allowed me to just exist for a while. But one story managed to pop through my blackout--the lack of WMD discoveries in post-Saddam Iraq.

It happened on a flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka. The flight attendant, seeing that I was a) American and b) therefore incapable of reading any Japanese-language paper, brought me a copy of the Japan Times. The JT caters to American businessmen living in Japan, and as such is printed in English. It also, like the more famous Times in the States, skews heavily to the left in spite of its masthead statement professing to present "All the news without fear or favor." But also, like our Times, is usually a good read, and I read it.

It blared with headlines and stories about how tough a time Tony Blair is having with his Labour backbenchers and backbiters about the lack of WMD discoveries in Iraq, and about how all this might cause Blair to fall and be replaced by a less America-friendly government. Which could happen, I suppose--Blair did use the Iraqi WMD threat more heavily than did President Bush to make his own case for Britain to send troops and fight alongside ours. He could fall if no WMDs are found, which would be a shame.

Throughout the JT stories, and others I've read since returning, are accusations that the Bush Admininstration and by extension the Blair government lied to their own citizens and the world to press the case against Saddam. They lied--they pushed headlong for a war against an innocent man and an innocent regime, at least as regards the WMD development, presence and threat.

To believe that Bush and Blair lied, you have to accept two things: That they knew that Saddam possessed no WMDs, and that they said he did in order to build the case for war against him. That means that you must also accept that Bush and Blair knew that, at the war's end, their lies would definitely be exposed unless they took steps to keep the lie alive. Our troops and the inspectors that followed them wouldn't find any WMDs, because Iraq didn't have any. Bush and Blair, knowing this, told the big lies anyway, to foment war.

Why would they do this? Why tell a lie that you know will be exposed shortly? And why would the two grand liars do nothing to make sure their lies were never exposed?

You could say, as many critics have, that the motive for war was always something other than WMDs. It could be Iraq's vast oil reserves, or the need to remake the Middle East into something more democratic and therefore less menacing than what it is today. War could be motivated by personal vendettas or for some other reason. War critics have used any and all of these arguments to oppose the war before it started and ceaselessly criticize it once it ended. But do any of these criticisms make sense?

While crafting their big lie, Bush and Blair did nothing to shore up its utility after the war. For Blair this would have been a particularly dumb move, as it would likely lead to his downfall and disgrace--many in his own party revolted as war neared. But he and President Bush nonetheless made cases before the House of Commons and the UN, they sent Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Jack Straw before the press and public to tell the lie, but they had no one working behind the scenes to make sure the lie would work once Saddam was gone. While relying on what turned out to be forged documentary evidence that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Nigeria, they never went out and forged any evidence of their own for the troops and inspectors to "discover" once Iraq was conquered.

As U2 once noted, it's no secret that a liar won't believe anyone else. Liars trust no one, and do everything they can to cover their own tracks. If you, as Bush and Blair, heads of two of the world's leading states, were brazen enough to lie to the world about Iraq's WMDs, wouldn't you also be brazen enough to "prove" that you were telling the "truth" about those weapons? Especially if it might mean the difference between your political survival or ruin?

Of course you would. If you made up the story, you'd have someone deep in NSA or MI5 also make up the proof to back it up. It wouldn't be impossible, or even very difficult, to manufacture and plant such evidence in the chaos of war. Which is why I don't believe that Bush and Blair were lying about Saddam's WMDs. Ironically, the lack of smoking-gun WMD discoveries proves that Bush and Blair really believed Saddam had them, proving that they believed the case for war to be based on truth.

Which isn't to say that not finding WMDs isn't troubling. It is. Whether we were acting on bad intelligence or Saddam, having had a year to plan for his involuntarily exile squirreled the weapons away where we couldn't find them easily, not finding WMDs is troubling. We need to find them, and as soon as possible, if only to verify that they aren't in the hands of terrorists already. We need to find them to finally lock up the case for war. We need to find them to destroy them.

But President Bush and Prime Minister Blair didn't lead the world to war based on a lie. They believed, based on intelligence and the stories of defectors and on the patterns of Saddam's own behavior, that Iraq had and intended to use directly or indirectly, weapons of mass destruction either against the US, UK, Israel or someone else. They believed it, and acted on that belief. They have made the world, in the long run, safer and deserve our gratitude.

Those who believe otherwise--that Bush and Blair knowingly lied to get us into war--owe the rest of us an explanation or two. Why would Bush and Blair lie without taking the time to "prove" they're telling the truth? And if Saddam's weapons weren't the motivation for war, what was?