Who Do You Trust?

During an NPR call-in following Colin Powell's address to the United Nations, a U.S. serviceman who favored going to war against Iraq asked, in essence, "Who do you trust more, Colin Powell and George Bush, or Saddam Hussein?" The correct response to this question is, "Why do I have to choose?" No one I know who opposes war against Iraq believes that Hussein is not a dictator, or that he lies (among all of his other misdeeds). But the fact that Hussein is dishonest does not mean the Bush Administration tells the truth.

Tom Spenser provides an important example from the last war against Iraq. In 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Chicago and an employee of the G.H.W. Bush Commerce Department, was assigned to provide an estimate of the Iraqi population. As Business Week explains:

Daponte ... had been assigned to update an annual world-population survey by Commerce's Census Bureau of Foreign Countries. That required her to estimate how many Iraqis had died from the war and its aftermath, including the rebellion of Shiites in the South and Kurds in the North (an additional 30,000 deaths, she estimated). Daponte used a 1987 Iraqi census and U.N. figures as her base of comparison.

Daponte's conclusion:

In all, 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict, she concluded, putting total Iraqi losses from the war and its aftermath at 158,000, including 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children.

The Defense Intelligence Agency later estimated that 100,000 Iraqi soliders alone were killed in the Gulf war.

Osborne's problem was that her estimate, though accurate, contradicted the statements of the Secretary of Defense, Dick "Chickenhawk" Cheney. Accordingly, Daponte's report was written to match Cheney's incorrect figures, and Daponte was threatened with the loss of her job. The sad fact is that American Presidents and their administrations lie during war, to suit their own purposes, whether it's Johnson and Nixon or Bushes Sr. and Jr. The current administration has made it a practice to hire liars from the Iran-Contra era.

The choice is not one between Hussein and Bush; it's one between truth and lies.