Abstract

The Lexicographers

Ever since the September 11, 2001, terrorism investigation commission stated authoritatively what everyone knew already, namely that there is no evidence that Al Qaeda was in business with former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a debate of a most peculiar character has unfolded. No one now claims that Iraq had anything to do with September 11, or any other attack on the United States, or even that Hussein's regime had any joint undertaking whatsoever with Al Qaeda. Rather, the debate revolves around the definition of words. The "New York Times," perhaps smarting from its confessed misreporting regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, editorially stated that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Hussein and September 11," and demanded "an apology" to the U.S. people from Bush. The only relevant facts left on the record were the negative ones described by the commission: Al Qaeda's early attempts to attack Hussein, whose secular Arabism it despised, by helping Iraqi Kurds and its rejected attempt later to secure assistance from Hussein. The Administration's response to the collapse of its case repeated the well-worn pattern of its response to the downfall of its claim before the war that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction: monotonous repetition of the falsehood in the face of manifest evidence to the contrary and then a redefinition of words (in that case, confounding actual weapons of mass destruction with mere "programs" for building them), and throughout a tireless insistence that they were right, detached alike from information and the meaning of words. They seem to believe that truth consists not of correspondence of word with fact but of an implacable consistency armored with impervious self-righteousness.