"If terrorists ever get their hands on weapons of mass destruction that will, in my very passionate belief and argument, constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people, and that would be the ultimate nightmare."
The key thing there is the reference to his "very passionate belief and argument". Now normally when someone is passionate about something, it's self-evident. They state their case and they do it with passion but they don't also say "I'm doing this with passion".
So why did Howard phrase it that way? To my mind, I think he wanted to make sure he put that concept of "passionate" into the public mind. If anyone argued his technical arguments (which they're now doing), the public would still get the message that Howard was passionate. Maybe even some press would run with it for him and describe his speech as "passionate". It's political spin of a very sharp kind because it makes it more difficult to argue the issue itself properly. "Why did they get the intelligence wrong?" "Well, it wasn't John's fault because he believed it passionately."
I raise this now because Tony Blair is using the same sort of emotional trickery to argue his defence of British involvement in the war. Witness the similarity in these words:
"I believe with every fibre of instinct and conviction I have that we are right in deciding to go to war without broad international support."
What next? Lawyers arguing their case in court by saying "but Judge, I passionately believe that my client is innocent, I really do"? Why is a higher standard of evidence required in a court of law on a simple murder charge than when a country decides to invade another?
George W. Bush also had a go at the word game of policiticians but as with so much of what he says, it sounds more like spin than honesty. Here's part of what he's said:
"We won't be proven wrong. I believe that we will find the truth. And the truth is he was developing a program for weapons of mass destruction."
Again, we see the "I believe" spin. Listening to that on AM this morning, he seemed to stumble when he reached the bit about "developing a program". That was significant because for months the rhetoric has been "he was developing weapons of mass destruction".
So the significant word there, the one that caused him to stumble was "program". What constitutes a "program"? We know a weapon is a big shiny thing that looks like a rocket. And a program? Maybe it's a piece of paper that says "hey Saddam, we should get build some WMDs?". Or maybe it's another piece of paper that says "yeah, good idea, signed Saddam". The politicians are trying to give themselves room to manoevre because it's looking unlikely they're going to find any of those big shiny things that look like a rocket. They're lowering the threshold of what constitutes justification for the war.
The other clever part of Bush's rhetoric (undoubtedly devised by someone other than him) is the "We won't be proven wrong.". It's like me betting that one day I'll kill someone. If I do it, I immediately win. But if I don't do it this week, you don't win. If I don't do it next week, you don't win. If I don't do it in the next five years, you don't win. Indeed, you can't really win - I'd have to die before you could say "see, I knew he wouldn't". It's a dumb way of arguing something. Bush knows that finding one weapon will prove his case but not finding one before the end of the year doesn't prove he's wrong. He can then say "don't worry, we'll find one next year".
Posted by david at July 18, 2003 11:11 AM