WE KNOW THAT governments lie. We know that the secretary will disavow all knowledge of our actions if we are caught or killed. We know that the government will say it was a weather balloon, a training exercise, a rogue agent, an accidental straying into territorial waters, a boiler explosion. "Gosh, was that the Chinese Embassy? I knew we shouldn't have depended on that Lonely Planet map."

Mostly, though, the lies that governments tell are not to foreign governments. The lies they tell are organizational. They are told for the purpose of diffusing blame or deflecting criticism. They are told so that a bureaucrat can keep his job.

The bureaucratic imperative only increases with the age of the institution. We did not "connect the dots" before Sept. 11 because bureaucrats did not want the impression left that field offices were smarter than the central office. We did not "connect the dots" because bureaucrats were afraid of being accused of "racial profiling." We did not connect the dots because hiring actual speakers of Arabic would disrupt the old-boy network.

Lies are also told to convince the voters that an announced policy is correct. Daniel Ellsberg participated in the lying about Vietnam for six years before he blew the whistle. If you read between the lines (and inside the lines, and use the special Washington decoder to analyze the lines), there are a lot of potential Ellsbergs in the CIA and the Pentagon.

They know what lies are being told. Maybe one of them will photocopy 2,000 pages of documents one day, and we'll all know what the lies are. But anonymous people are already waving their hands and saying, "Honest really bad idea do something no killing please."

Folks with a sense of history think of the days before World War I, when everyone was sure that somebody sensible would stop this madness and no one sensible did, and the century of unprecedented carnage began.

IT'S A COMIC opera, in some ways. We are planning to invade Iraq because it might have nukes one day, and North Korea jumps up and down and says, "We have nukes right now, yes oh yes," and the United States says, "Well, no more oil for you guys. Where were we?"

Australia experiences something that had almost the psychological force that Sept. 11 had for us, the bombing of a nightclub in Kuta Beach (the Fort Lauderdale of Australia, although technically in another nation), and we say, "Terribly sorry, old things, but how about that Saddam fellow?"

Chechen terrorists hold Russians hostage in a Moscow theater, and administration wonks stay up all night trying to figure out a way to blame it on Iraq.

It's like, hello, the war is over here. Worldwide Islamic fundamentalist uprising. Saddam Hussein: not an Islamic fundamentalist. I really think Dick Cheney needs to learn to use Google.

IT SEEMS CLEAR that Saddam Hussein is most dangerous when he feels threatened. Our plan: Threaten him. It seems clear that Saddam Hussein is isolated from negative information, living in a dream world in which the entire world supports his wonderfulness against the evil American empire. It is tempting to say that the only world leader as isolated from negative information as Saddam Hussein is George Bush himself.

And Bush has nukes! I'm sorry, Captain, we had to destroy Western civilization in order to save it.

The scary part is that the legislative branch of government, the one charged by the Constitution with protecting us from the imperial presidency, has gone over to the other side. We don't have checks and balances; we only have blank checks.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle

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