When a great nation has lied

Thanks to George Bush and his monumental bluff, history has a chance to last longer. When the US Congress passed a resolution last year authorising him to go to war in Iraq, it talked about the grave threat the United States faced from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to al-Qaeda. If anything, these two main pillars of the resolution have been proven to be nothing but bogus. History, like a wronged man, will not quit until it has been avenged.

The Washington Post reported this week that what the Defence Intelligence Agency analysts claimed last September were largely in the subjunctives. They said that Iraq probably possessed "chemical agent in chemical munitions" and "bulk chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also could consist of some mustard agent and VX," a deadly nerve agent. The politicians chose the best part of the DIA report and used it to serve their cause.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

According to many, it was Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, who masterminded everything, and eclectically packaged the half-baked truth that justified the attack on Iraq. Cheney orchestrated the exaggeration of facts, influenced intelligence agencies, the media, military strategists and manipulated the system to create the ground for the war and garner support for it.

Two weeks ago, The Washington Post retraced one of its stories and found that much of it was false. The capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch was in the earnest tradition of the conspiracy to fabricate truth. The whole world was told that she had been shot and stabbed by the Iraqis, that she had gone down while fiercely fighting the enemy until she was taken a prisoner, hospitalised, and found eight days later.

The truth is Lynch apparently was never shot. Lynch apparently was never stabbed. She may not have even had much of a chance to put up a fight. When her unit came under attack, her vehicle went off the road and she suffered several broken bones. She was taken to a Baghdad hospital where the Iraqi doctors treated her. Not a surprise, because truth is the first victim in any war. Chemical Ali, who was rumoured to be dead and buried during the war, is now said to be alive and hiding in Iraq.

The question that haunts the imagination is why has a great nation lied. Iraq wasn't a neighbour of the United States and by no means posed a threat to its security. It hasn't been found connected with al-Qaeda network to take any blame for the attack on the Twin Towers. There is no stockpile of armaments that could jeopardise regional or global security. Why has the USA gone through such an elaborate manufacturing of truth in order to occupy Iraq?

Perhaps, the answer is as good as anybody's guess. But that doesn't matter, because the rationale isn't always rational. The fact is one cannot but discern a discrepancy in the American behaviour. If it's fair to lie in order to justify one's mischief, then that should rarify everything decent into the air. Every time there is a criticism of the war in Iraq, it's not always the anti-American sentiment, but the perceived moral gap that bothers the mind.

No matter how many ways we look at it, that moral gap comes across as hypocrisy. It's not the mismatch between word and action that is so much the issue here. People make promises and they don't always live up to those promises. But this particular hypocrisy has the stench of decadence, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a civilisation loses its vigour, its energy wanes and dies, when a civilisation reaches its final hours.

The most advanced nation in the world has resorted to old tricks. It bluffed, cheated, and lowered its standards, which created moral outrage all over the world. In turn, that outrage created a terrible void when all things lost relevance, when the sanctity of the right and the perfidy of the wrong were confounded in the questionable conduct of an otherwise respectable nation. More than anything, the dishonesty of the most democratic government on earth has created a crisis of civilisation.

Frankly, a crisis is often the opportunity when greatness rises to its occasion. The American society, the pinnacle of the Western civilisation, has failed to seize that opportunity after 9/11. Instead it has behaved like a wounded beast blinded by pain.

It forgot Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, the countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Latin America, where its soldiers killed and destroyed in the name of democratic order. It forgot that for greatness one must destroy as well as build, suffer as well as inflict, and tolerate as well as terminate. It forgot that democracy is about tolerance, whereas the empire always strikes back.

A great nation has lied, and the only way to understand it is to take it within the context of time. It has lied out of conceit, the sure sign of arrogance, which leads to decadence and by that sin has fallen many empires. The Iraqis have suffered this time, and the only way to understand that is also to take it within the context of time. Their country has been occupied, which is the sure sign of an ordeal they are going to endure.

But that is where history will get a jumpstart. The Iraqis are certainly going to fight the occupation, and the world will revile at the increasing realisation that a superpower had not behaved within its dignity. There will be a new struggle ensuing from this conflict, when, once again, people will be willing to risk their lives for a purely abstract goal. Once again, a new ideological struggle will begin that would call forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism.

If anything, the telling of lies by the highest nation has clearly marked a crisis. It has marked that crisis for the Western civilisation when all things sublime has been reduced to ridicule. Every civilisation has seasons of life. It has birth, growth, periods of vigour, decline and death. The lives of people in a given time make a generation, generations taken together make a civilisation and civilisations are the building blocks of eternity. This is how the finite creates the infinite, the limited begets the unlimited and the ephemeral produces the eternal.

Those of us, who are old enough to feel, will feel that the crisis has deepened in our hearts. How can we distinguish an advanced nation, which has lied in order to go to war, from a matured man, who befriends a child with candies and then molests her? How can we distinguish an empire where might was right from a democracy where the rights and freedom of a weaker nation has been crushed by the military prowess of a stronger one? As history moves from finite to infinite, limited to unlimited and ephemeral to eternal, hope it would not quit before it has given us an answer.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.