Thursday, February 14, 2008
Truth, Lies, & War
Study: Bush led U.S. to war on 'false pretenses'
Click HERE to read about a study contending that the Bush administration made 935 false statements (read 'statements' as 'knowledge claims' in TOK parlance) over a two-year time period as it made its case for going to war in Iraq. [As you reflect and respond, resist the urge to pursue the political partisan angle of the story. Focus more on issues of knowledge, truth, justification, belief, certainty, etc.)
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7 comments:
We are dependent on the government, and without question we take their word as truth. Why? Well mostly because of our ignorance and overall lack of knowledge over the political scene. From a fairly yearly age we had patriotism pumped into our blood. We have been taught that the government is in control and we put them up so high, that we forget that it is just ordinary people that run our country. Ordinary people that make mistakes and unmoral decisions. We believe our ears without any justification for such claims. Well then how can the government get away with blasphemy and we, like ignorant children believe them. While our friends, family members and co-workers need justification for their claims? Its because of the fact that we put the government close to a higher power, and have thrown out common logic and looked the other way. All in order to not break the balance of the thing that we have programed to think, since childhood. Frankly i think that we are just as afraid to admit that we are wrong, as the government itself.
It's very hard for me to not focus on politics here, so I will try to bring up only ToK topics. First of all, can a statement really be a lie if you believed it was true when you stated it? For example, we had no way of knowing for certain at the time if there were WMDs in Iraq or if Saddam was conspiring with Al-Qaeda. Bush and other government officials stated that these were a possibility. The only way to find out would be to gather evidence to justify that belief. Second, no one wants to just go to war. There has to be a good reason to take such action. Democracy spawns complacency and the people of this country certainly have a history of ignoring what's important in the world in order to go on with their lives. Even for the righteous cause of stopping Nazi Germany and Japan, it took an attack on Pearl Harbor to finally galvanize us into World War II. We can usually see two points in American war psyche: there's the cowardice and ignorance that surround prolonged war efforts like Vietnam or Iraq and then there's the war hysteria that follows events like Pearl Harbor and September 11th. In the war hysteria, people are going to be very susceptible to any policy or decision that will cause some kind of vengeance. Once this hysteria runs out, they go back to whining about how we shouldn't be in a war. It's a cycle that goes up and down and the way people interpret statements from our government are affected by what stage we're in. I certainly don't remember so many misinformed people thinking that they were critics of the Iraq war in 2002. The ideas in the administrations statements may have turned out to be false in the end, but that doesn't mean they were false in the beginning. Saddam could have easily let us inspect his country for WMDs or publicly denounce the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for their actions, but he didn't. He chose to be difficult and we had no other option than to use force to obtain our answers. I'm not denying there were outright lies in the last few years ("We know that Saddam has WMDs and is ready to use them") but was there any way to prove or disprove that statement years ago? No. A perfectly responsible administration, or a single person for that matter, should not make claims without knowing all the facts. A lot of the claims made by Bush and friends turned out to be superstition and before these reporters start becoming so omniscient and self-righteous, they should look back on what they believed a few years ago and reflect on how they took the claims.
=Michael Benitez=
These 935 false statements by Bush are easily proven false now, because we have all the information, as they say hindsight is 20/20. However at the time George Bush was making these false statements there was no real way to prove them false. Granted at the time some of the information being presented may have appeared to been suspect, but there have been lots of information that was suspect that actually proved to be true. Our government managed to save lots of lives by intervening on information that wasn't complete. If this managed to be one of those times then no one here would be complaining about there being a few false statements and half-truths. Even though this isn't one of those times and there are plenty of false statements made, there has to be another point looked at, and that is the fact that we are not finished with our conflict or war or whatever the correct term for what is going on, when we are finally finished then it may turn out that these statements were true it just took a little longer.
There have been many times in history, were espionage and political cover ups have kept civilians in the dark about the truth. The Bush administration is no different. We usually believe anything that is reflected though the media, mostly because we tend to think that the media cannot lie to us. We are too naive as a nation and too oblivious to the lies that we've told as people. The media and politics have been connected all through out history, and it was propaganda through the media which gave politics a bad name to begin with. Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Mao have all used the media to their advantage in order to spread their ideas and unite the people to their advantage. Political figures, just like any human being on this planet, can tell a lie. George Bush along with his party had told several, in order to justify their beliefs that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But as it turns out they were wrong, and people soon found out about the hundreds of lies which he laid upon the people, in order to get what he wanted. And of course if it turned out that Bush was in fact correct, people would not focus on the lies which he told them, because his suspicions would of been proven right. The ridiculous part about the entire matter is that people would only care about Bush's misleading statements if he is wrong, but if he was right he would get little credit to gain. So when it comes to matters of truth, in this case the only way we find the truth is by finding out all that is false.
The following post is courtesy of David Breckenridge:
I know that the blog has been closed off from comments for whatever reason, but, regardless of whether or not I get credit, maybe my comment could still end up on there...
The truth about the Amercian people is that essentially we want to feel victimized, and we want to find somone who is worse than us to justify the wrongdoings and evils in our own lives. Now it may not always be to the same extremity, but, as people, we justify our wrongdoings by comparing them to people who have done worse so that they are seen as less. The reason that people want to believe that they are victimized is because if they are then they are not the bad people an any sense of the word. In fact they are the good guy because they distinguish a particular authority as the bad guy and thus it wasn't there fault. These justifications were used back in the 70's and 80's when homosexual festivals were rampid. If people are not waiting till they have sex to be married and breaking old moral codes that they know to be true, they can make it seem as if their actions are not as extreme by pointing the finger at someone who is worse or by stating that because that bad thing i s okay then this is too. If they can claim that certain mental sicknesses aren't a result of choice but unfair circumstances that influenced their decisions, then they can claim the same about certain natural behaviors that are uncontrolled or not kept within the line of divine intention.
Now no matter what happens, their will be a select group of people, presumably liberals, who will try to claim that America is the bad guy, and that they were against it; the reason for this is that the assumptions about the countries that they are making to begin with are flawed. People are taught only to recognize the blessings we have here in america and the suffereing or problems in other areas, as a means of being "enlightened" and therefore better. If America is to blame for all of their problems then they can make things fair and everything here must be fair as well. The argument could be made that many liberals actually hate America and aren't aware of it. They see the good living of one and bad of another and want to make it fair to everyone so that they feel like everything is equal and no one will have to deal with any hardships or problematic differences. This socialistic view is applied not just in America but also in the w ay that most liberals view the entire world; So it is likely that they want to make those other countries have everything the same as us, not recognizing that in order for that to happen everything has to come back to capitalism because people are prone to evil and selfishness, and certain people will never work because they have nothing to live for, and they are so gone you can't get a radar fix. People want to believe that we are all good else they will have something to hold them accountablel for and remove the rebellious desires. This is one of the many reasons we need to recognize the need for a savior.
The need to help pther countries shows up all the time, but whenever we actually try to do anything people turn around and look at the problems we have when performing the processes and claim that it is bad and unfair. It is very similar to the situation in Rahwanda where we had an oppurtunity to go there and stop the genocide. If we intervene people will get upset. If we don't they will still be upset. This unfortunate occurance is partially due to the fact that they want to be upset, and also due to their ignorance about the specific circumstances themselves. Now the chain of command that ends up leading back to Bush has several different reports that have to be confimed. If Bush is led to believe that there is evidence of weapons of mass destruction by several people under his command, then he is trusting that all of these people are correct. This is the only way to remain efficient in a time of urgency. Now there is no pr oof that they weren't trying to get or misleading us to believe that they had them, but to people think of any possibility as to why there were so many reports? no. Instead they assume what they want to and what the liberal media fills them up with: that they are victims of other bad guys. For all we know they could have moved them or began to make them, but people will assume that Bush lied because it works out best for their own self esteem. We also had all kinds of reports of inhumane acts which violate Human Right's acts; Saddam Hussein was a evil man who was hurting the general people> and unfortunateely people want to say that nobody their wants us there. This is also no reflective of reality. They definitely want us their since we are the only ones who came to their aid. However if you focus on th select well to do people who were probably on good graces with Saddam then yes it wiould seem that those ;people on those cameras don't want us there.
It boils down to the way that people hear things and accept them as truth. If they are already dishonest because of sin in their lives then it is going to be a completely different point of view that sets out to find facts with an agenda.
hmm, this may go a bit beyond just the scope of how we know if the issue is true....
This comment is courtesy of Laura Cortez (aka lcutie0390
This comment is courtesy of Michelle Tupper:
I think that Bush has lied over and over again. It seemed like it was a good thing at first, but as it appears that we really aren't there for a good reason, the lies become more of the truth.
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