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12/01/2005:

"Noble Lies: When Dick Cheney gave President Bush distorted pre-war intelligence it was more than a simple lie to advance a war, it was the “noble lie” necessary when superiors are inferior."

...Pieces of the puzzle are clearly missing. But a clue to how things ultimately come together emerges from another source: Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. In a recent speech to the New American Foundation, Wilkerson argued that a secretive cabal led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made virtually all the decisions about Iraq. Wilkerson maintains that these decisions were “sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less.” Wilkerson seems to be implying that President Bush wasn’t always in the loop about Iraq.

When one pieces this together with another curious fact, that an unusual number of the Neoconservative advisors surrounding Cheney and Rumsefled (Libby and Wolfowitz in particular) were disciples of the philosopher Leo Strauss, one arrives at a startling but tidy conclusion. Strauss, in a nutshell, advocated a view that harkens back to Plato’s Republic, the notion that perceptive and visionary leaders must often tell “noble lies” to their intellectually inferior subjects for their own good. Strauss took Plato’s argument one step farther. He argued that today’s policy elites are frequently intellectually superior to the chief executives they serve and must sometimes deceive their own leaders into making the right decisions.

Wilkerson makes it clear that Bush would have been completely out of his depth had not men like Colin Powell “trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet.” As Wilkerson condescendingly adds, “[Powell] held a youthful and inexperienced president’s hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the Secretary of State, would fix it.” Powell, however, was not part of the Neoconservative cabal pushing for war. The Powell Doctrine -- only commit to war when you have an overwhelming number of troops to insure total victory -- was anathema to Neoconservatives who wanted to prove in Iraq that a light but high-tech U.S. military could win wars quickly and easily. Powell was the antithesis of the Neoconservative plotters, but he was effectively cut out of the decision to invade Iraq; Bush informed him of the pending invasion only after the decision had been made.

The secretive Neoconservative cabal that operated out of Dick Cheney’s office -- with Lewis Libby at its center -- may have been far less solicitous of their commander-in-chief than Powell was. It is highly probable that they steered Bush towards unreliable intelligence and prevented him from hearing dissenting opinions. Wilson claimed he wrote his NY Times Op-Ed piece debunking the administration’s Iraqi/Uranium claims because he was “outraged” that information the administration -- particularly Cheney’s office -- should have known was false was included in Bush’s speech.
interventionmag.com