We Hold These Ambiguities . . .

The cry of “liars” was surely evoked by the Aznar government’s initial, and probably honest, attribution of the bombing to the Basque independence group ETA. (Enemies at home usually seem closer than enemies abroad.) But Zapatero had already structured his campaign around this slogan: “My first principle: Thou shalt not kill. My second principle: Thou shalt not lie.” In the United States, misrepresentation of intelligence assessments is the Democrats’ main accusation against President Bush.

Is politics, then, primarily a matter of what is true and what is false? To say that baldly seems somehow odd: Truth and falsehood are more central to science, to scholarship, perhaps to personal ethics. We expect a politician to use rhetoric, to put forward his best case. No more would he floodlight everything embarrassing than a woman would wear her ugliest dress to church. In foreign policy, we hold “frank discussions” with the French, not acrid exchanges that only underline our mutual hostility. Government is not a true and false test, yet current debate is trying to make it one.

Indeed, an insistence on truth in politics is endemic to democracies. In modern representative democracies, intelligence is assessed, and policy generated, somewhere in a vast labyrinth of overlapping, competing, and generally anonymous bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies are only in principle chosen by the few high officials who are, again in principle, chosen by a president that we, or the majority, actually voted for–back before many of today’s problems had emerged. For the citizen, it is very frustrating to try to identify and reward the makers of good policy in government, or to know how to enforce his wishes. Perhaps it is this gnawing awareness of how tenuous are the links between citizen and policymaker that whets our hunger to hold accountable the few high officials whose names and responsibilities we actually know. And perhaps, as well, we strictly scrutinize the veracity of our officials in order to live at ease in our democracy; vigilance against lying officials can be an excuse for not finding out about urgent matters ourselves.

The Bush administration, like Aznar’s government, has no clue how to respond to the partisan charges of misrepresenting intelligence and policy in the war on terrorism. Whoever shapes public strategy in the White House is passively accepting the framework of debate structured by the president’s worst enemies: Intelligence information consists of discrete, hard little facts like coins minted by the gleaming, efficient machine of “the intelligence community.” By inserting the appropriate coin in the equally efficient vending machine of policymaking, we make that machine drop the right policy into our hands.

This entire image of government in a republic is a bizarre science-fiction fantasy out of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In fact, we need an intelligence community only because someone doesn’t want us to know something. We are trying to find something out because someone is trying to cover it up. Therefore intelligence information is usually ambiguous and debatable. Often, the problem is worse: Our intelligence targets conceal things not only by secrecy but by active efforts to make us believe something else. Finally, there is almost always too much information, and of unknown reliability.

Given all these ambiguities, the framework in which one interprets particular signals is inevitably important. That some high policymakers–who had more experience than intelligence analysts and at a far higher level–assessed certain intelligence information in a different framework from some analysts is not reprehensible. It is as easy for intelligence analysts as for investors to make an analysis on the basis of a framework that is wrong. Investors, for example, tend to make decisions on the basis of general confidence or lack of confidence in the market; during the recent tech bubble they were wrong.

The problem of intelligence was presented in a classic way in Roberta Wohlstetter’s book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Every White House staffer should read this book. Wohlstetter begins with the numerous indications that, in retrospect, pointed to a Japanese surprise attack. The problem was that there were far more indications of a Japanese attack somewhere else or at a different time. As Wohlstetter puts it, the difficulty is in separating “signals” from “noise.” These data were then analyzed by bureaucracies that approached them with plausible, but ultimately misleading frameworks: that the Japanese wanted Indonesian oil, and would attack in Southeast Asia, or that their best weapon was sabotage by the Japanese community in Hawaii. Because they are so general, the frameworks of intelligence analysts are no more foolproof than the frameworks of high political appointees. Sadly, they are all highly fallible. As citizens, we need to face squarely the vast difficulty of good government.

The Bush administration, however, has replied to accusations of lying to the public by blandly asserting that intelligence information is clear and the “intelligence community” processes it in a perfectly efficient, “professional,” undebatable way–like a machine. Thus the Bush White House hangs its survival on the immaculate judgment of the CIA–which has repeatedly been wrong, from the Bay of Pigs through recent estimates of nuclear proliferation.

To appreciate the agonizing situation of Bush administration officials after 9/11, or Aznar administration officials in Spain, we must add the factor that overshadowed everything else: the vast stakes of being wrong. In the ordinary, everyday business of government, officials can shove aside information that is ambiguous, unreliable, or debated. After 9/11, in contrast, President Bush and his officials had to respond to real and appalling danger knowing that “the buck stops here.” They had to take responsibility either for acting on the best knowledge they had at that moment–fragmentary and ambiguous as it was–or for not acting, allowing whatever threats Iraq posed to grow and strike at a moment of our vulnerability. It is sometimes even necessary to accept an “intelligence estimate” minimizing a certain threat, but to act on the opposite estimate, because the consequences of the worst case outweigh the risks of acting against a threat that is less likely to come about. As Henry Kissinger has observed, if the French Army had used its then-vast preponderance to counter Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland, assistant professors would still be arguing whether Hitler had ever posed a real threat. By waiting to find out Hitler’s true intentions, we found out “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Too late. Wasn’t hedging against unlikely but mortal dangers the entire meaning of our expensive posture of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War?

No mere candidate–no John Kerry or Zapatero–has ever been in the position of facing those grave choices, in the knowledge that whichever course he took would be his responsibility to bear. Therefore the campaign debates on the Iraq war, in Spain as in the United States, have moved into a fairytale world of infallible intelligence services issuing clear intelligence estimates with certain policy consequences. In this make-believe, world the question whether government lies to its citizens conceals a more essential question: Is it saving their skins?

President Bush knew after 9/11 that he had to choose a course of action in ignorance of how it would turn out for the country or for himself, using his best judgment in the face of tremendous uncertainties. He chose the riskier course, in the short run, but the more provident and responsible course. That course has exposed President Bush and his courageous advisers to numberless misunderstandings, demagogic accusations, and humiliations, which they have borne patiently amid the loneliness of high command. Every American, and every Spaniard too, ought to be grateful for their sense of responsibility.

In a free republic, of course, it is the voter who bears the ultimate responsibility. The citizen must try to understand these uncertain and difficult issues as best he can and choose leaders who will execute the right policies. Always, demagogic candidates for leadership will seek to replace the real issues with that weary ritual, the drama of the powerful and guilty deceiving eternally the simple and innocent. Beneath this endless clamor, the fact remains: We face danger, a danger whose complexities are not neatly displayed behind the glass of a vending machine.

Charles Fairbanks is a research professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins/ SAIS and the director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.