In not so recent letters to the editor of a local newspaper, I put forward two arguments. The first was that Democrats cannot claim that the President misled them into voting for the invasion of Iraq. They cannot persist in the schoolboys' lament, 'He made me do it!' The second was that the President knew before he sent the troops to war that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when he sent the troops to war. In light of subsequest events, each party denied moral responsibility for its actions because it believed itself badly informed before the troops were sent to war. I argue that the parties' ignorance could not have been unintended. Over the course of their lives, their way of life, our way of life, had shown them what it is to know about events in distant places.

From our earliest training as toddlers, and in the context of famlial ties, our way of life carries with it experiences with the concept of 'evidence' if not with the word itself. With time and varying contexts, at first tentatively, then with needed love, kindness and decreasing assurances, we are brought to comprehend distant places and other persons. On the basis of things ranging from the most immediate to those that are themselves inferred, our world is expanded by family and community. In western culture, but not limited to it, these challenges enter to form our sense of stability, trust in others, trust in our own capacities, and trust in the physical world. In a manner of speaking then, from birth it has been built up in us that claims about things-on-the-ground-in-distant-places and not directly observed are derived from a variety of
sources. Yet, it is also given, from earliest training, that when true, such claims are secured by things that are more substntial than the initial reports of honorable men. In certain kinds of cases, principally including military cases, the techniques by which such claims are secured has progressed over time.

In May 1960, in order to firm up our beliefs about the status of Russian technology,
President Eisenhower ordered our U2 technology to fly over Moscow and Leningrad. We received our answer about the staus of Russian tehnology when the plane was shot down. However, for my pupose it is only important that we had a technology that fit into a well established culture for knowing about events in inaccessible places. We had a technology that revealed how we go about finding out about . . . .

Two years later, In October 1962, President Kennedy showed the American people, and the world, the reason for his great concern about Russian activity in Cuba. In detail, Kennedy fingered sites, silos, missiles, fortifications, tow and support vehicles, and troop quarters. The area had been photographed by U2 technology fitting within the paradigm for what it is to know inaccessilbe places.

During the fifty years of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union photographed every square inch of relevant ground in the other's country. In the marriage between science, technology, military and industry, the public was subjected to intense propaganda about the use of tax dollars and our ability to pick out from space a pack of cigarettes in a shirt pocket. In actual practice, we had developed the ability to move satellites from one position to another, and even to park one above a particular spot of ground.

On page on of The New York Yimes of 6/19/06: "A senior American official said that the intelligence from satellite photographs suggested that booster rockets had been loaded onto a launching pad, and liquid-fuel tanks fitted to a missile at a site in North Korea's remote East Coast." The source went on to say that it "looks like all the systems are 'go' and fueling appears to be done."

We arrive at the following formulation and question: given Mr. Bush's depiction of the threat, and given his often stated belief that the threat was real and immanent, then given the available space technology. would he, with his firm view of the meaning of "Commander-in-Chief," have refrained from using his spy-in-the-sky technology before he sent his troops to war? Would he have thought: 'Can't do it. Iraq's a soverign country.'? Indeed, given Mr. Bush's professed and honest belief about the threat of WMD, his failure to use spy technology would have made him, in his own eyes, utterly irresponsible.

Given the President's beliefs about Saddam Hussein and given his expressed attitude toward the use of military power in behalf of homeland security, entertaining the idea that he did not use military technology strectches credulity past its breaking point. But then . . . since we know now that they had no weapons back then, we are faced with the inference that, having exercised prudence by exercising his powers, Mr. Bush knew back then that back then Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

So there we have it, a tentative but utterly reasonable picture of a President who, in one
hand holds the guarded truth about the ground in Iraq, while in the other holds the WMD sideshow.
Admittedly, there is one scenario in which Mr. Bush did not use space technology. If the President believed back then that back then Iraq did not have WMD, then it follows that back then he would have rejected the use of satellite imagry because in his mind such pictures would have shown that his alarm to the world was both groundless and suspicious. So the bind is this: if he used it, then he knew, and if he did not use it, then he knew.

If we know now, and we do know now, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, then knowing that tells us more than there were no weapons back then, or that Democrats were merely mistaken back then, or that many of them made and "error of judgement" back then. It tells us that Democrats failed to be alive to themselves. They failed to demand that which our way of life had long demonstrated is at the foundation of such claims as those of the President when the President's claims issue within the framework of our way of life. It seems that the parties rejected their way of life.

Unfortunately there is more. Moral failure is not the province of Democrats and Republicans. While "We the people" freely ask our troops to risk life and limb for our way of life, now, with our own necks in the noose, we stumble over ourselves in a mad dash to trade-in bits of that very life, we say, the troops risk death to protect.

Dr. Einstein once said "Everything has changed except the way we think," but it seems to me
everything has changed except the way we tend to be.

John M. Giannone
Setauket, N.Y.