Justin Raphael: Bush's credibility clearly in question

"An institution," wrote Emerson, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." How long and sinister, then, is the sacred shadow of freedom when the elected leader of its national guardian is so cavalier with the truth it makes possible.

President Bush came to Washington pledging to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." His brilliant campaign staff turned once choir boy Al Gore into someone who would say anything to get elected with the implication that the deceit of the Clinton administration was not confined to one man.

For a long time, much of the country wanted to believe the genuine sounding governor from Texas; after all, the truth is much more abundant in the Texas hill country than it is on Capitol Hill. But almost from the beginning, the administration changed its tone, not the tone in Washington. What the candidate once derided as "fuzzy math" became for his budget plan politically Euclidian, as the full fiscal damage of trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy slipped under a radar jammed by a lack of candor about the figures. While the administration's policies became blandly compassionate and devolved to an extent that they were only nominally conservative, this trend continued.

And then the Twin Towers fell and suddenly truth was so much easier -- freedom or terror was a simple choice. With the good feelings of the post-Cold War era and the booming Clintonian '90s crumbling around us, we grasped for a truth that became so obvious the president could yell it out of a bullhorn at Ground Zero. And the tears in your eyes told you that ours was a truth worth fighting, and dying, for.

Iraq, we were told, was the next step, and suddenly there was intelligence to prove it. We, this writer included, went along. As much as we believed the evidence about barrels of anthrax and missiles to deliver them, we knew that other people deserved the truth that freedom brought, the truth spelled in the smoke of the rubble in Lower Manhattan. Democracy and freedom meant peace and security, the president told us, and tells us. I thought he was right then; I believe he still is.

But if freedom brings truth, then it is sad that our president has so much trouble telling it. It is now clear from the analysis of David Kay and others that little or no weapons of mass destruction were active in Iraq, though it is debatable, even likely, that Saddam sought such capacities and would have used them. I still believe the war in Iraq to be justified, but I am at a loss for words at those who can lend the president's credibility the same distinction.

I don't know if the president deliberately ignored the truth or whether its facsimile presented by the CIA was wrong. I do know that there are more than 500 American men and women who do not have the privilege of asking that question. The administration and the president himself maintain that matters of war and peace are just too self-evidently important to get bogged down with integrity and opposed a congressional investigation into intelligence failures. The same ideologues who tied up the Senate to debate a sex affair now say that since nobody in Washington tells the truth, it's not if we tell lies; it's how we use them.

Of course, the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein in custody, but are we in a better place in the world when our word rings hollow? Can people across the globe have faith in our immortal ideals if they cannot trust what we say? And is our model of democracy any better for another chapter in unaccountability?

President Bush claims his actions are justified as a war president, and there are surely things the American people shouldn't know about national security whether or not his rhetoric on that subject has increased or decreased its reality. But if the American people had a right to know about a dress stain, aren't we entitled to know if there is a mark on the president's own record? He claims he served in the Alabama National Guard in 1972 while working on the Senate campaign of family friend Winton Blount III. So far, there is no evidence Bush ever did any duty at the Alabama base, aside from taking dental records there.

The Bush folks have argued that John Kerry himself said in 1992 that Vietnam should be kept out of the campaign, and I agree; those who won Purple Hearts, served in the National Guard and criticized the war were all patriotic in their own way. But the issue is not how or if the president served, it's that he said he did -- and if there is one lesson from that quagmire, it is that a lack of truth can lastingly cripple both our people's trust in politics and the effectiveness of our realpolitik. Camus had it right: "To justify himself, each relies on the other's crime."

President Bush said over and over again that he could not trust the word of a madman Iraqi president. Can we be anything but mad that we cannot trust the word of ours?

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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