Abstract

Command of the Truth

Editorial. The article presents an editorial which discusses United States President George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq War as of 2004. It is one measure of the decay--and the promise--of American political discourse that Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command" arrives at a moment when John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi's "Unfit for Command" sits atop the New York Times bestseller list. Whereas Hersh's subject is the moral corruption of our government, O'Neill and Corsi take aim at one man, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who, they say, did not deserve the medals he received for service in Vietnam. Their implicit premise (shared by the Bush campaign and by its proxy organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) is that dissent in wartime is unpatriotic. In this view, truths must be rejected if they call into question the idea of American innocence--whether revelations by veterans like Kerry in 1971 of widespread U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, or reports of the systemic problem of torture at detention centers such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo today. The Bush Administration's strategy has been to promote a culture of denial, in which American abuses are first covered up, then acknowledged with shock and horror, then absorbed and neutralized and finally forgotten. The White House's Abu Ghraib damage-control operation was largely directed, Hersh reveals, by Vice President Dick Cheney, and it allowed the Administration to emerge from the scandal relatively unscathed, even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized a covert program whose main purpose was to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and allow for the torture of terrorist suspects. As chaos and carnage force Iraq back into the headlines, Kerry has another chance to combat the culture of denial and lies that has defined Bush's campaign and his war.