I've been thinking vaguely about the "WMD scandal", and what it means for those who've had any "reservations" about the war on Iraq (i.e. various antiwar elements, plus those who staked their support for the war purely on the idea of Iraq's immediate and long-range threat to their "security".) The thing is, no matter how much various commentators are trying to give Bush, Blair and Howard their own Watergate (involving impeachments, resignations or dismissals), I somehow doubt that this "missing weapons" flap is going to develop into such a "scandal of state", despite the real furore that exists, and despite the very real "crimes against humanity" involved.
Of course, it's important for us to get a clearer picture of how our leaders so shallowly try to dull us with double-talk. The deceptions at hand reveal both a pathetic and incompetent desperation to fulfill the various robotic imperatives of war, and the utter contempt in which various self-styled untouchables hold us (e.g. "don't worry about making it watertight -- we don't care what the public thinks, if anything"). This particular knowledge should be put to good use, but I nonetheless get the feeling that any attempts at scandalography that conform to the limits of legality, individualised truth and statecraft are doomed to encounter widespread disinterest on any practical level.
Why? One only has to think about the previous decade's genocidal, UN-enforced sanctions on Iraq to realise that the real imperatives of imperial warmaking are not hinged on questions that can be settled with lie-detector tests, by following the law, or through "multilateral diplomatic solutions". And I think a substantial number of people in the world, whether they oppose such imperial adventures or not, already realise this on some level. Of course, liberals will interpret this as the mindless apathy of the masses, but I just see it as an undifferentiated potential that could be ideologically coded in numerous ways. In any case, these sorts of realisations lie outside any type of "public" that would be the imaginary audience for the "scandals of state" that liberals are hoping for.
Our leaders don't care what "the public" thinks of the thin justifications for their violent adventures, and "the public" doesn't think much of them because "the public" doesn't exist. The governmental contempt for "the public" is indeed a contempt for us, but why should we conform to this corporatist fantasy? The only people that do conform in this regard seem to be pundits, and especially those who have a proximity to (and a touching faith in) the state -- including Nixon's former counsel, in this particular case! These are the people who talk in terms of "respecting the duties of public office", etc., and who look wide-eyed with false naïveté when it's revealed that the people in power cheat and murder. Meanwhile, the variegated spheres of circulation and community that do exist in society are continually trying to escape this totalising image of themselves in relation to the state, even if it's "just" through drinking, or fucking, or simply hanging out with each other.
And what is "lying" all about, these days? As with John Howard's "children overboard" mini-scandal, obsessive questions about individuated knowledge/speech acts on the part of the commander-in-chief are somewhat beside the point. That the Australian Federal Government initiated a cancerous orgy of racist deceptions to consolidate its power should be known to all, but whittling away at the collective political culpabilities of class, state and nation until they disappear, and all we're left with is whether X lied about Y, is unacceptable. What use is it to tie ourselves in knots over individuated lies when it is clear that these acts occurred, and continue to occur, in a much wider ethical vacuum? I fail to see how calling for a Royal Commission challenges the racist operations of the nation-state.
So it is with the weapons of mass destruction, and, indeed, the whole question of US Government complicity in the events of September 11. The spiral of 911 conspiracy theories betray a kind of hermeneutic sickness. When systemic lies like "we're fighting for freedom when we bomb the shit out of poor people in Afghanistan" are standard, individuated lies and mundane conspiracies are a given, and to ferret them out and accord them an overinflated grandiosity in ways that fail to challenge the parameters of the game is to give up on a fundamental level.
