Authentic?

Michael Bywater, in a review from the Independent and just in passing, writes:

This is… a good time to publish a book on faking and inauthenticity. The fundamentals of democracy, liberty and fair dealing have never been so consistently and soupily dissembled. Our liberties are being constrained under the guise of increasing them; following Saddam’s capture we are being fed, behind the transparently phony rhetoric of high purpose, the oldest logical error of all time, the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. In this case, that means they got Hussein because the “war” was, and is, a just one.

OK, maybe with the scare-quotes round ‘war’. Wasn’t the ‘war’ a war – just like that? I mean, quite as much as Bywater’s review is a review rather than a ‘review’?

Then, despite all the arguments either way about the legitimacy or otherwise of that war, was there ever any doubt, once it started, that getting Saddam was part of the declared ‘regime change’ purpose? They tried to get him on the first night, after all. What have post and propter got to do with anything?

Then, ‘transparently phony rhetoric of high purpose’ – a suggestion about it. Many of the war’s opponents just represent this as phony because they’re unable to allow that there might have been justifications on the other side, even though they themselves remained unpersuaded by these. But think about how many such people regard themselves as liberals. The would-be liberalism of some of them is able even to encompass a sympathetic understanding of terrorists. But not another authentic viewpoint that they can respect about the war. Odd.

Finally, ‘under the guise of increasing them [our liberties]’. One can argue about what constraints on liberty are justifiable in the circumstances, but once this has been said, isn’t the ‘guise’ here rather an aim: the aim of protecting liberties? Isn’t there an intention to protect ordinary people from being blown to pieces, or maimed, or disabled, or afflicted in some other ghastly way – for I take it Michael Bywater’s allusion – with ‘constrained’ – is to the war (or, as he would probably prefer again, ‘war’) against terror? So, is this a guise? Shouldn’t it be a ‘guise’, because there is a genuine threat? Or isn’t there?

It’s a difficult business, authenticity; and scare-quotes, too.