In Doubt We Trust

The Bush administration is releasing small pieces of intelligence in dribs and drabs to make its circumstantial case for war with Iraq. Hints were dropped in the State of the Union message, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell promises more at the Security Council today.

In making the case for war, there is one thing on which President Bush and his critics agree: It's all about trust. The leaders of eight European countries who signed on to the war effort in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal and European papers last week didn't make a judgment on the evidence; they argued that history and the North Atlantic alliance demanded that Europe trust America.

But if the case for war rests on trust, there are good reasons why this president, like any powerful democratic leader, needs to be distrusted.

First, healthy republican democracy was founded and thrives on a fundamental distrust of power. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights enshrine that principle. In Federalist Paper 51, James Madison notes the "great importance in a republic" of guarding society "against the oppression of its rulers," while the Constitution's most impressive devices, from checks and balances to an independent judiciary, reflect distrust of concentrated power.

Thomas Jefferson opposed the idea of a presidential State of the Union message, saying it reeked of a "speech from the throne." Modern-day Republicans often campaign on the premise that Americans should not trust "big government," but they quickly forget their reservations once they win big elections.

Some people argue that war attenuates the case for distrust. Yet war and truth are not a good match. Presidents have manipulated, edited and at times perverted the truth -- usually, to be sure, to obtain popular and congressional support of what they believed were worthy ends. The Gulf of Tonkin affair, in which a largely fabricated story of attacks on American war vessels was employed to stampede Congress into support for a major escalation of the Vietnam War, comes to mind. Or the sinking of the battleship Maine by what may have been (but was never confirmed as) a Spanish mine in Havana Harbor in 1898, an event used by President McKinley to help bring the country into a war with Spain over its colonies. Or President Eisenhower's prevarications about the U-2 incident and President Nixon's about the Cambodia incursion.