Levine cautions against undemocratic means

Peter Levine, a deliberative democracy expert, has been expressing concern about undemocratic means being used to scapegoat figures in the Plame Affair, ultimately making matters worse for the state of democracy in the US. I agree qualifiedly. But I also add a bit further perhaps from a somewhat different perspective. I sent him some comments for his blog (which is worth a daily read) in response to his post, "Criminalizing Policy." He kindly added them to the comments. Please read his post first, then take a look at these comments of mine posted below (I've edited late-night misspellings, poor grammar, and stuff):

I'm still not quite clear on how a process of broadening the Plame investigation into a broader indictment of the Iraq War is undemocratic unless it's on purely rhetorical grounds. Yes, I agree, there are many people who were tacitly complicit in the justification of the war. And I recall pre-war that there was pretty good evidence that many of the charges or justifications for the war were trumped up, evasive, misleading, outright lies, etc., which makes the silence all the more devastating. There was, however, also a highly organized campaign to slander any criticism as unpatriotic and even treasonous. My wife is French (and no fan of Chirac) -- I'll tell you some time about the harrassment she went through here in the US for the simple fact of being French. This was the pre-war climate created by the administration and its media spokespersons. You're right -- those who willingly ignored shaky evidence are not off the hook. This includes John Kerry, Bill Clinton, and other supposed opposition figures. Out of self-interest, they did not wish to risk being labeled as treasonous and allowed what I consider (and considered) an utter disaster to take place. Many in the State Department and elsewhere in government were critical of the supposed evidence, but they were also quickly silenced through a series of demotions and firings, and then relegated to low-readership marginal news sources as places to express their views. The list is long.

This is not simply a hindsight perspective either. I recall having long debates with friends and acquaintances about the war perhaps a year before the invasion -- smart and generally informed people who accepted entirely the premises for the war laid out by the Bush administration. Any qualifications made in the face of vague or dramatized or demonstrably false evidence generally fell back on an ingrained Cold War logic of democratic domino effects in the Middle East as a justification for invasion and occupation of another country. Deliberation was based in constantly shifting goalposts and carefully managed rhetorical excesses.

We did not have a poorly informed national deliberation so much as an entirely manufactured one in which it took real diligence, analysis, and often courage to see anything beyond the manufactured debate and to speak about it. That in itself functioned in an exclusionary way, eliminating much of the public from genuine deliberation through either misinformation or chastisement. It is to say that there was no genuine deliberation if the basis of democratic deliberation involves accurate information, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.

To make the simple claim that the Plame Affair is an overall indictment of the war is indeed simplistic. But La Repubblica's recent dossier on the yellow-cake documents and other evidence shows a concerted effort to create an overall argument for the war. The Plame Affair is directly linked to Joseph Wilson's editorial that the evidence claimed by the administration was false. Rumors have it -- and DC is full of rumors that are often wrong -- that Fitzgerald is expanding his investigation into the forged documents and that this may implicate Silvio Berlusconi, Dick Cheney, and John Bolton. We also knew pre-war that the office at DOD for post-war planning was occupied by two guys with masking tape on their door indicating in magic marker the name of the office. Colin Powell knew that the aluminum tubes claim was false or, supposedly in his own words, "bullshit." State has since been transformed after Powell's resignation into a top-down organization taking orders from the White House under Rice (this from people who work at State), rather than the bottom-up filtering process of information management. So much for that institution of checks and balances in foreign policy.

But... there is a sense in which the Plame Affair may actually be a real indictment of the entire Iraq War. There's no reason why anyone who supported it -- especially those in positions to know better, including generally likeable officials such as Colin Powell -- should necessarily be held unaccountable. This war shows very deep problems in the American system and to acknowledge that sooner rather than later may be painful, but necessary.

If what you mean by "dangerously undemocratic development" is that we may be looking at a scapegoating that helps others to "dodge responsibility," then doesn't that apply equally or more so to the entire policy of the Bush administration from pre-war to post-war? And then shouldn't accountability start somewhere? I worry more about the damage already done to American democracy and international legitimacy and the further damage that could be done by allowing those who manufactured a devastating foreign policy to be relieved of any accountability. The difference is that I think very good evidence shows that this runs deeper than the Plame Affair.