In the fall of 2002, I attended what was basically the biggest gathering of Beltway anti-Iraq War types during the key season when the Bush administration was selling the war. Joe Wilson was there, liberal foreign-policy types from the Clinton administration, and so on. Several hundred people.
The big keynote speech was by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and he shared an anecdote that remains chiseled in my memory and I’m sure the memories of everyone else there. It was October 1962, he said, and an American official in Paris, I believe the ambassador, who at the time was Chip Bohlen, one of the famous post-war Wise Men, was sitting with a French official. I’m pretty certain it was Charles de Gaulle himself, but I don’t recall for sure.
At any rate, the American informed the Frenchman that U.S. intelligence services had in recent days taken some shocking photos of Soviet missiles being placed in Cuba. The American had on the table before him a file folder filled with surveillance photos. He went to push it in the direction of the Frenchman (whom I’ll now just call de Gaulle for the sake of simplicity).
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“No,” said President de Gaulle, according to Brzezinksi. “I don’t need to see these photos. If the president of the United States says it, that’s good enough for me.” He pushed the folder back toward Bohlen, unexamined.
Brzezinski paused. “Could you imagine,” he asked his gobsmacked audience, “a foreign leader reacting that way today?”
The answer of course was no—this was at a time when the Bush administration was talking about Saddam Hussein and mushroom clouds and other sheer, factless pieces of propaganda; and when it was bullying and browbeating rotating members of the U.N. Security Council, notably Mexico and Chile, to get on board to support a war resolution or else.
But compared to today, George W. Bush seems almost credible, and 2002 quaint. In the Iraq War run-up, some of the world believed Bush. Tony Blair sure did. Or said he did. There were a handful of others as well.
At least when Bush & Co. lied, they made an attempt to make it look good. They manufactured “evidence,” like Colin Powell’s infamous U.N. presentation, that made it appear as if they were trying. They went through the motions of respecting the institutions and norms that governed the process of going to war. The mere fact that they sought congressional approval (albeit in the fall of an election year, an election year in which they smeared a Democratic senator, Max Cleland, who’d left three limbs in Vietnam) and a U.N. resolution gave the enterprise, like it or not, the approval of officialdom.
Now—skip to today. What portion of the world believes Donald Trump, do you think? Oh, his adorers believe him. The same old 30-whatever percent of Americans. But around the world? I can’t imagine anyone believes him. Even the people in the Arab world who are cheering Qassem Soleimani’s death, the Sunnis and secularists of Lebanon and so forth, surely know the rationale is a crock.
I’ll admit that when I watched his press conference, I thought this was going to be a net positive for Trump. He took out a bad guy. The “look out, here comes Iran’s response” narrative had been flogged for days, preparing the American public for something operatic, but when it came, it was nothing. A few missiles. They even gave us advance warning. In other words, Iran blinked. Trump won. At least so I thought.
Then came that stunning USA Today poll. It showed that yes, an unimpressive plurality approved of the strike (42 for and 33 against, with 25 percent not sure). But when respondents were asked whether the attack made the United States more or less safe, people said less safe by a whopping 55 to 24 percent. The biggest single chunk, 28 percent, said “much less safe.” Also, by 52-to-34, people called Trump’s behavior toward Iran “reckless,” and by a slam-dunk 52-to-8, they said the killing would make it more likely that Iran develops nuclear weapons.
Rest assured, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have come out of last week with numbers like that. Neither would any other president. But Trump did. How’d that happen?
Well, it turns out that when you lie 16,000 times in three years, it kinda hurts your credibility. Also jumping from this idea to that one like a frog hopping between stones during a storm, that doesn’t help much either. Also saying well, it was one embassy that had been threatened, then that it was four. Also those disastrous briefings for House members and senators, where the briefers said absolutely nothing specific about these threats and everyone in the room (everyone not drunk on Trump Kool-Aid anyway) smelled the steaming horseshit from a mile away.
Oh and finally: In the middle of all this, sending Kim Jong Un birthday wishes! That was really stable and geniusy.
But mostly it’s the lies. The blanket of lies, the cloud of lies, the ceaseless parade of lies, lies, lies that come out of Trump’s mouth literally every time he opens it. Outside of MAGAmerica, everybody has long since figured out not to rely on a word he says.
“If the President of the United States says it, that’s good enough for me.” This used to be a thing. That’s actually how most of the world felt about the president of the United States, whoever it was. That’s not to say presidents actually did tell the truth in world affairs all the time, from LBJ on the Gulf of Tonkin to Nixon on Cambodia to Dubya on WMDs. But the bald-faced lies were comparatively rare, until now. Today, if the president of the United States says it, it’s self-serving palaver that isn’t true and makes the world a more dangerous place.
There will be consequences to this that we can’t even begin to imagine. Future showdown with China or Russia? Or indeed with Iran? Why should the world believe the United States? It won’t. The new mantra will be, if the president of the United States says it, it’s garbage.
