So few words, so many consequences

By Rob Elder

Mankind has never settled the age-old question of whether ends justify means. But to act ethically is to hold yourself responsible for finding good means, as well as good ends.

That—not who failed to edit President Bush's State of the Union message—is the point of the current so-called "intelligence scandal."

The desired end was to build support for invading Iraq. The means included a 16-word statement in the most important presidential speech of the year, saying Britain had information that Iraq had tried to import uranium from Niger. The implication: Iraq was building nuclear weapons.

The problem is not just that the statement has since been discredited and retracted. It's also that the uranium report was known by the CIA to be false, months before the State of the Union address. What we should ask is not who failed to take it out of the speech, but who insisted on putting it in. Not since Bill Clinton hanged himself by claiming, "I did not have sex with that woman," has a president gotten in trouble with so few words.

We may never know details, but what we do know suggests this: After 9/11, the administration, unable to find Osama bin Laden, decided to go after Saddam Hussein.

The challenge was to show a clear and present danger. It helped that Saddam was believed to have chemical and biological weapons, and had used them in the past. But the thought that Iraq might have, or be working on, nuclear weapons was even scarier. And someone, someone high-ranking and powerful enough in the Bush administration to overcome CIA reluctance to use bogus evidence, got that uranium claim into the State of the Union speech even after it had been removed from an earlier presidential speech.

If we had found weapons of mass destruction, nobody would remember the uranium story. But no WMDs have been found. Reconstruction of Iraq is off to a faltering start. Our soldiers are dying daily in Iraq. Americans are beginning to wonder how and why we got into all this.

In the face of all this, the president keeps coming back to his main point: Saddam was evil; it's good that he's out of power. This is the old end-justifies-means argument, and it is strikingly similar to an article in this month's Atlantic Monthly by Robert D. Kaplan.

Arguing that no other nation, group of nations, or international organization can be trusted to run the world, Kaplan makes a startling claim: "For the time being, the highest morality must be the preservation . . . of American power." He also says, "The war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified."

But not disclosing all your plans is one thing, and deceiving Congress, the American public and the world is something else entirely. The president says it's time to move on. I disagree.

To be ethical is to say that ends don't justify means. The highest morality is not simply the preservation and increase of American power.

Rules are necessary, especially for powerful nations and the powerful individuals who lead powerful nations, because only in a system of rules are leaders held accountable. It's not just a matter of getting to the right end; there are good ways and bad ways to get there. Misleading the public and the world about the case for war is not one of the better ones.

This article originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on Monday July 21, 2003.

Rob Elder is senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

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