Global outbreak of candor?

We seem to be witnessing a sudden, worldwide epidemic of candor:
In the US, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, and the head of the Iraq Survey Group (Charles Duelfer) have all been voicing comments and assessments that shred the already thin tissue of lies on which the administration had earlier built the case for invading Iraq.
(Juan Cole has brought together the accounts of most of these incidents of candor. The Beeb’s account of the Duelfer report is here.)
In the UK, the Daily Telegraph recently published excerpts from previously unreleased British Cabinet Office documents that show that,

Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for “many years”…

The documents also show that the people in the Cabinet Office were quite aware of the flimsiness of the evidence indicating that Saddam had WMDs in the pre-war period.
(You can find a good analysis of the revelations made in those leaked documents, done by Cambridge University’s Mike Lewis, here. Lewis also provides a handy portal to a PDF collection of the leaked documents.)
Okay, I know that the publishing of leaked documents doesn’t count as “candor” on the part of the officials concerned, but bear with me….
In Israel, Sharon’s eminence grise Dov Weisglass has told Ha’Aretz flat out, regarding Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza and a tiny handful of very marginal West Bank settlements, that:

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process…
And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress…
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Well we kind of knew that already, didn’t we? But still, it’s interesting that Weisglass feels confident enough–including of the support of the US president and “both houses of Congress”–that he can talk openly about this underhanded, deeply anti-democratic and abusive scheme.
And then, there’s Iraq, where just a bare few days after he’d prattled on to the US public that everything inside Iraq was coming up roses, the country’s US-appointed PM Iyad Allawi is now somberly telling his own people that,

It’s clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges… The police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority…

Okay, so there we have three significant Bush administration hawks, Dov Weisglass, and Iyad Allawi– all infected with this new virus of truth-telling… How on earth can the rest of us, who have gotten so used to hearing lies and evasions from such people, adjust to this new reality?
First of all, how can we explain it?

In Weisglass’s case, I think two main factors explain his outbreak of candor:

(1) He and his boss, Sharon, evidently feel the need to “win the argument” against the even more extreme rightists inside and outside Likud who’ve been accusing Sharon of seeking to “appease” the Palestinians, or worse, with his disengagement plan. This interview–which Weisglass apparently gave quite voluntarily to Ha’Aretz’s Ari Shavit, looks as though it’s part of that campaign.
(A longer version of the interview will be in Friday’s Ha’Aretz.)
(2) Weisglass and Sharon evidently feel zero embarrassment talking about the underhanded, intentionally anti-peace-prrocess nature of the disengagement scheme in front of what they must know is a worldwide readership of Ha’Aretz… They have no “shame” about it. Why should they? Their assessment that they have the support of “both houses of [the US] Congress” for their scheme–as well as the present administration–is quite accurate. Why should they need to feel embarrassed?

In Allawi’s case, I think a similar combination of quasi-fascist bluster with a need to (at least seem to) engage honestly with the real concerns of his constituency can also explain his outbreak of candor.
So that brings us back to the three administration hawks, Duelfer, and the intriguing question of the British leaks…
The Daily Telegraph’s story on the pre-war planning documents was published on September 18. It didn’t receive nearly the amount of exposure it deserved in the US press. There is no indication inside the DT story, or anywhere else that I have found, as to who it was who leaked the documents, or what the motives of the leaker might have been. It is notable, however, that the DT is a rightwing, generally pro-Tory newspaper; and the article about the documents was published in the lead-up to a Labour Party conference at which it was expected that Blair would come under a lot of criticism for his solidly pro-US stance on the war.
What struck me, looking through the collection of documents lodged on the web by Lewis and his colleagues, are two main things:

(1)How early the Brits had made the judgment that the Bushies were intent on forcing regime change in Iraq, by force if necessary; and how early they had decided to throw in their lot with this plan. Bothese judgments seemed to have been firmly in place by early March 2002.
(2)What a big contribution British planning apparently made to the whole effort to prepare the ground for the war.

In this internal document from the Overseas and Defence Secretariat, date March 8, 2003, the relevant ODS mandarins laid out an entire political-strategic game-plan for how the preparations should proceed. They should, the document recommended, include the following elements:

* winding up the pressure [on Saddam]
* careful planning
* coalition building
* incentives
* tackling other regional issues [especially the Middle East Peace Process– hollow laughter is the only appropriate response to this]
* sensitising the public [in the UK and abroad].

And those are the steps–well, all except one–that the Bushies then also religiously undertook as they prepared the ground for the war.
Within days, Blair foreign-policy advisor David Manning was having lunch with Condi Rice in Washington. (“Condi’s enthusiasm for regine change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.”)
Manning was also almost palpably slavering at the view he had developed of the size of the influence Blair could have on Bush’s final decision on Iraq:

No doubt we need to keep a sense of perspective. But my talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking decisions…

I find that judgment incredibly significant. Was it accurate? Who knows? But whether it was accurate or not, the fact that Manning (and most probably also Blair) believed it to be true mean that they should bear an equal part of the responsibility to that borne by Bush for Bush’s fateful decision to launch the war.
It seems from this that it was not the case that Blair judged that Bush was going to laucnh the war anyway and had decided nonetheless to stick close beside him in order to “limit the damage” or whatever. No. It looks as if Blair and his person, Manning, sincerely believed that their views would influence Bush’s decision.
(Manning also rattled on blithely to the effect that, “The Iraq factor means that there may never be a better opportunity to get this Administration to give sustained attention to reviving the MEPP.” More hollow laughter required here, too.).
Well, anyway, there’s a lot more of huge interest in those leaked documents…
Why have the Kerry camp not paid more attention to the content of these documents— which issued crystal-clear warnings, more than one year before the launching of the war, of the dangers of sending in forces that were too small; of theoverall political riskiness of the whole war venture; of the shakiness of all the so-called “intel” on the Iraqi weapons programs; of the unpopularity inside Iraq of Chalabi and Allawi, etc etc?
But anyway, I’m assuming Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Co have been keeping fairly close tabs on all the leaks from London. So maybe those leaks helped provide the context in which they started saying, in effect, “Okay, so all the justifications we gave for the war beforehand are a crock of ***, and we know it. So what the heck? Our base will vote for us, anyway!”
It strikes me that if this was the frame of mind in which those two guys (and Bremer) underwent their recent episodes of (okay, still partial) truth-telling, then that is very similar to the quasi-fascist, bullying way in which both Weisglass and Allawi treated their constituencies: with a totally shame-free attitude toward their own previous mendacity; contempt for their hearers; absolutely no commitment to future truth-telling; and a dangerously cavalier attaitude to matters of truth and history altogether.
Like the bumper sticker says: “Clinton lied, and no-one died.” But Bush and his acolytes?? We have not yet seen anything like the end of the trail of corpses that will eventually be lined up at the door of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their teams of guilt-free fabricators.
Candor is, I guess, better than continuing to weave the web of lies. But to be sincere and constructive, any outbreak of candor should be accompanied by an admission of one’s past mis-statements; remorse for the consequences of those mis-statements; a commitment to take full responsibility for those consequences; and, at the very least, a willingness to resign from responsible office.
Ain’t seen it yet.