Jigsaw

I cheat at puzzles. There: I admitted it. I can’t help myself. I look at the picture on the puzzle box while I’m doing the puzzle. A cardinal sin.

Or so I’ve been told by aficionados who would burn the box if they didn’t need something to put the pieces back into. You’re not allowed to look at the picture, you see, because then you can guess where the pieces go—just by lookin’ at ‘em! Context changes the nature of the problem.

Is George W. Bush a jigsaw puzzle aficionado? Maybe not in his living room. But when making a case, or an apologia, for war, he displays a familiar concentration on the pieces at the expense of the whole.

That was made very clear today by his statements about the Kay report:
bq. Let me tell you what the report said[.] It states that Saddam Hussein’s regime had a clandestine network of biological laboratories. They had a live strain of deadly agent called botulinum; that he had sophisticated concealment efforts — in other words, he’s hiding his programs; that he had advanced design work done on prohibited long-range missiles. [New York Times] [Link added.]
And:
bq. His interim report said that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program spanned more than two decades. . . . He says that the WMD program involved thousands of people, billions of dollars and was elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In other words, he’s saying Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger[.] [Washington Post]
Sound familiar? During the runup to war, Bush and his henchmen played the same game. They slapped down puzzle piece after puzzle piece: no record of destruction of arms; past history of use; snippets of incriminating phone calls; aluminum tubes; one Al Qaeda guy who took in the buffet at the Baghdad Hilton. From this they arranged a portrait of a necessary war.
Now they want to defend the necessity and justice of that war with the same technique. Only now, their duplicity is exposed, because we can all see the picture on the box, not just the pieces they want us to see. We can see the public Kay report, where he says that Hussein’s much-touted nuclear program was in “the very most rudimentary state.” We can see that Kay has found no chemical or biological arms, and no evidence for the existence of a credible program to produce either. [Washington Post]
Kay has validated the work of the UN weapons inspectors. He has proved, beyond any doubt, that there was no need for the war to begin when it began. He is well on the way to proving that it need not have begun at all. Bush’s selective emphasis on those parts of the picture that he likes can’t convince anyone of anything but his fundamental dishonesty and affection for propaganda.

Filed under: politics/war