Our local paper, the West County Times, is asking for people to comment on Bush's decision, back in 2003, to declassify certain information to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, apparently as a counter to Joseph Wilson's op ed piece pointing out that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been engaging in the sort of nuclear hanky-panky that the administration had claimed as such justification.
Given that the current administration has carried secrecy in government back up to the limits of paranoia, it would be inconsistent (shall I say hypocritical?) of me to condemn Bush for declassifying anything. Let us therefore praise the man for this act of openness, perhaps with a few faint damns.
Or shall we damn with faint praise? It seems that Bush declassified only that material which would support his decision to invade Iraq, but not that which would have counterindicated such an act. It would seem that a more courageous and praiseworthy act would have been to declassify everything.
But maybe, you may protest, there was no evidence, at the time, to suggest that Iraq was not engaged in a nuclear buildup, in the development of biological weapons, in the readying of stocks of poison gas. Well, after the invasion we discovered that there was no nuclear program in Iraq, that there were no mobile bioweapons labs, that Iraq's sometime stocks of poison gas had been relegated to history. If we couldn't figure that out before the invasion – and look, guys, they weren't keeping this a deep, dark secret, but shouting it to the world! – then our intelligence services are in deep doo-doo, and we may as well surrender to the first micronation that comes along. But personally I don't believe that the CIA is that thoroughly incompetent, and if I'm correct in this then the president had to have had all the information he needed not to go to war. So what we end up with was a politically-motivated selective declassification of material, aimed at making a political point. And so I will not praise with faint damns, but damn with faint praise.