The left is predictably eager to find in the so-called “Downing
Street Memo” — in which a British intelligence official wrote back
in July of 2002 his impression that President Bush had already
decided to go to war in Iraq and that “the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy” — “the smoking gun” that will
finally turn the Iraq War into the scandal they have been insisting
with ever increasing shrillness it has been all along. They have
another incentive too, since the fact that the memo was first
published in the London Sunday Times on May 1 gives them a
scandal twofer. Not only, that is, does the memo reveal the scandal
of the Bush presidency, but also the delay in giving it wider
currency reveals that of the allegedly “right-wing media.” The
insurmountable difficulty they have to face, however, is that you
can’t really have a proper political scandal if it’s only a scandal
to one side of the political divide.
If, back in the days of Watergate, the Republicans in Congress
had merely shrugged their shoulders and refused to co-operate with
the investigation of the Watergate break-in and its aftermath, the
Democrats would have grown apoplectic about it, but they would
probably not have succeeded in forcing President Nixon to resign.
It was only the willingness of key Republicans such as Howard Baker
and Barry Goldwater to treat it as a scandal that made it one. The
Democrats should be particularly alert to this essential datum
about scandal because they themselves used it to good effect in
l’affaire Lewinsky. The Republicans jumped up and down and
screamed until they were blue in the face, but hardly any Democrats
broke ranks. They merely shrugged their shoulders and tut-tutted
about naughty old Bill. But what were we going to do? Kick him out?
As it happened, no. Though they were in the majority, the
Republicans failed to remove Clinton from office.
But the Democrats have apparently not profited from their own
example, since they are now the ones who are now trying to sell a
one-sided scandal without success. The measure of how frustrating
this is can be found in the rising temperature of the rhetoric, as
if saying that you hate Republicans “and everything they stand for”
as Howard Dean did — everything Howard? including
patriotism and a strong defense and victory to American arms? — or
that the transient discomforts of a small number of prisoners at
the detention center at Guantanamo Bay are comparable to the mass
murders of a Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, as Senator Dick Durbin did,
could somehow make up for the indifference of the hated Republicans
to the monstrous iniquities that seem so plain, so unmistakable to
them. But this is one of those scandals that you have to believe in
in advance in order even to be able to see it.
Not being one of the faithful myself, I find the Downing Street
memo a ludicrously inadequate peg to hang a scandal on and nothing
at all like (to change the figure) a smoking gun. The mere opinion
of a British intelligence officer, however elevated, who was
obviously less enthusiastic about the idea of war with Iraq than
the Bush administration was, is hardly dispositive as regards any
wrong-doing, even if he had made a less ambiguous claim that there
was any. Moreover, it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see as
early as the summer of 2002 that President Bush was planning to go
to war in Iraq — which is why I wrote what I called “the conservative case against” the
war in “My Diary” of August 30, 2002. It would have been
astonishing if people in the White House were not being at least as
assiduous as I was about preparing their case for the
war.
Or, as a hostile observer might put it, “the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy” — as indeed they are
around every policy that has to be sold to the public. That’s how
these things work. To find in that fact alone evidence of bad faith
on the part of the administration is like saying that a defense
attorney is guilty of bad faith for not making the prosecution’s
arguments as well as his own. But of course it is not just this
that makes Bush, in the eyes of his detractors, guilty of bad
faith. They start from that assumption, as they have done almost
since he was first elected and the most fervent among them began
blithely accusing him of having “stolen” the election. In doing so,
they themselves were fitting the facts to the policy, though in the
view of most non Bush-haters, I suspect, with even less
plausibility than the President made the case for war.
There is another reason, I think, why they are putting so much
faith and emotional energy into a dud scandal, and it is suggested
by Mark Danner in a piece in the most recent number
of the New York Review of Books. Titled “What are you
going to do with that,” it is a version of a commencement address
that Mr. Danner gave to this year’s graduates of the Department of
English at the University of California at Berkeley, an institution
at which he himself is a professor. Ostensibly an apologia
for the English major — being one, Danner says, “is to live not
only by questioning, but by being questioned” — the piece quickly
degenerates into the sort of standard anti-war, anti-Bush screed in
which the NYRB specializes and which is at least one thing
that Mr. Danner himself obviously doesn’t expect to be
“questioned.” Joining the Downing Street memo to the alleged
scandals of the WMD and Abu Ghraib (“to name only two”), he notes:
“What is interesting about both of those is that the heart of the
scandal, the wrongdoing, is right out in front of us. Virtually
nothing of great importance remains to be revealed.” Comparing
these new “scandals” to Watergate and more or less all the scandals
since, he goes on to discern a trend.
What distinguishes our time — the time of September 11
— is the end of this narrative of scandal….So we have had the
revelations; we know what happened. What we don’t have is any clear
admission of — or adjudication of — guilt, such as a serious
congressional or judicial investigation would give us, or any
punishment. Those high officials responsible are still in office.
Indeed, not only have they received no punishment; many have been
promoted. And we — you and I, members all of the reality-based
community — we are left to see, to be forced to see. And this, for
all of us, is a corrupting, a maddening, but also an inescapable
burden.
To be fair, the ludicrous expression “reality-based community”
is cribbed from a high government official who claimed, as Danner
tendentiously supposes, that the administration can manufacture its
own reality. But he uses the term apparently without irony and
adopts it as a badge of honor: a sign of his special status in
being vouchsafed, along with “reality-based” English majors
everywhere, the ability to see scandals that are invisible to the
rest of us.
A scandal that only smart people can see! What could more
perfectly sum up the thinking of the American left of the past few
years. I have noticed in this space before how widespread is the
assumption among President Bush’s detractors of their own superior
intelligence and the meanness of the President’s. These are the
kind of people with the bumper stickers reading: “Somewhere in
Texas a Village is Missing Its Idiot.” Self-evidently, a majority
of the American people do not agree with the proposition that all
the smart people hate Bush, and yet the left cling to it as to dear
life, as if eventually everyone will have to come round to their
point of view, to see what they themselves have seen all along and
gratefully to acknowledge that they have been the wise and far
seeing ones — those, in short, who have borne the corrupting,
maddening and inescapable burdens of being so darned
smart.
Could anything be less “reality-based” than this?
