17
information may be said to mislead the public. If government officials or others mislead
the public consciously and deliberately, by means of lies, falsehoods, deception, or
concealment, we say they manipulate public opinion.”
33
More simply put, these definitions contend that threat inflation is a form of
exaggeration or lying that degrades the quality of public deliberation. Though these
definitions strike one as commonsensical, even obvious, they lose much of their
usefulness when we challenge the traditional model of the marketplace of ideas and
acknowledge that the motive force underlying the marketplace is not truth but values.
The marketplace of values perspective challenges the conventional definition on
several fronts. First, as noted above, a worldview is required before one can even
determine which facts about a potential threat are the relevant facts. Taking the case of
Iraq, for example, many have come to take for granted the primacy of the WMD debate,
both in terms of judging the Bush administration and with respect to supporting the war.
In fact, however, the “truth” about Iraqi WMD development only became important once
the President had evoked it in service to constructing a larger argument about the threat
posed by Iraq. What made WMD salient for the Bush team were the values and the
worldview that Bush and his foreign policy team shared. Those sharing this worldview
placed an extremely high value on American security, placed a relatively low value on
international cooperation and international organizations, and in the wake of 9/11
believed that preventing another major terrorist attack on the US homeland justifies
dealing with gathering threats before they strike.
34
33
Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1992), p. 356
34
Wittkopf has labeled those sharing this set of beliefs about security “hardliners,” and the general
worldview supporting such beliefs “militant internationalism.” See Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of
Convention