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The
U.S. government is launching a public relations
blitz designed to show the American people that they shouldn't
believe the evidence right in front of their eyes, because
our success (or lack of it) in Iraq is all in how you look
at it. The President has complained that the "good news" about
Iraq has been blocked by the "filter" of a hostile news media,
as MSNBC
reports: "Bush said he was concerned that 'perceptions' didn't
reflect the reality of 'progress' in Iraq."
Meanwhile,
in Iraq, another suicide bombing blasted
a Baghdad police station, killing 8 Iraqis; a
Spanish military attach้ was assassinated by three Iraqis,
one of whom was dressed as a Shi'ite cleric, and we suffered
our 92nd American
casualty since "victory" was declared.
Who
do you believe, asks Bush: me, or your own lyin' eyes?
According
to the President's epistemology, it's all a matter
of "perception." There is no objective reality: just spin.
That is a politician's mindset, one that the chief executive
of the most powerful nation on earth might prove particularly
prone to. Us ordinary people, however, are governed by different
rules.
To
the weekend warriors of the National Guard and other reserve
units, there is no way to spin their extended
deployments. Are the casualties, and the
horrific numbers of wounded, a matter of "perception"?
Try telling that to their families,
Mr. President.
Bush
complains about a "media filter," but what he would like to
see is a government filter that would downplay the
unfolding disaster through a thick layer of gauze, and highlight
photo ops of clean-cut GIs helping little old Iraqi grandmas
cross streets.
The
schools are opening, we are told: isn't that cause for
celebration? Well, bully for the Iraqis, but what can this
mean in the context of our own decaying educational system
turning out a generation of illiterate juvenile delinquents?
America,
said Bush the other day, "did not run from Germany and Japan
following World War II. We helped those countries become strong
and decent and democratic societies that no longer waged war
on America, and that's our mission in Iraq right now."
Excuse
me, but World War II took millions
of lives and left a continent in ruins: the conquest of
Iraq took three weeks, and, however horrific, hardly resulted
in the utter destruction of the country. This WWII analogy
is disturbing, no doubt, to veterans of that conflict, who
might detect just a slight bit of exaggeration. But it is
also unsettling to conservatives. They look at the costs,
in troops and treasure, and extend that out over a half a
century the length of our stay in Japan and Germany, where
our troops are still presumably guarding against the return
of the Nazis and a possible coup by Japanese militarists.
It
isn't only the antiwar left that finds the President's invocation
of the post World War II era ominous. Conservative Republicans
who have invested a lot in George W. Bush are getting increasingly
nervous. As the polls chart declining support for
the war, with a
majority opposing the President $87 billion funding request
for Iraq, so the President's own poll numbers continue to plummet. Whispered
doubts
pervade GOP
ranks. Will the President sacrifice his post-9/11 popularity
on the altar of a futile and increasingly unpopular war, pouring
money down the Middle East rathole while the country sinks
into recession and reverts to the tax-and-spend politics of
the Democrats? The seismic
power of California's populist earthquake is being felt
all the way to Washington, D.C. The great fear is that George
W. Bush will throw the election on account of this war –
and drag the rest of the party down with him
And
for what? This is the question ordinary people Democrats,
Republicans, Libertarians, independents are asking as the
lies that roped us into war are exposed, one by one. What
must be particularly galling for Republicans, however, is
the sheer ineptness of the administration's much-touted "public
relations offensive on behalf of the war.
We
have the much-touted story of the lone bottle of supposedly
deadly botulism
that had been sitting in some Iraqi scientists' refrigerator
for a decade. When that
one fizzled, the administration's PR men came up with
a unique interpretation of the failure to find weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq. Team Bush announced the detection,
by David Kay, the Javert
of the arms inspectors, of an "intent" to acquire WMD.
Yes,
and I have an intent to acquire a fortune bigger than Bill Gates' that is,
right after I institute world peace.
This
administration is absolutely tone deaf when it comes to defending
the rationale for war. Condoleezza Rice had the nerve to get
up in front of the Council on Foreign Relations and declare
that, while they have yet to find anything remotely resembling
WMDs, what they did find was evidence of a "massive deception
campaign" carried out by Saddam and his underlings that continued
"right up to the end."
Look
who's talking! They lied
about WMD, and they lied about links
to Al Qaeda, they lied
about Iraq's nuclear capabilities now that's a "massive
deception campaign."
It's
sad, really, in a pathetic sort of way. Administration officials,
unhinged by the impossibility of defending the indefensible,
are now projecting their own crimes onto the wide screen of
official propaganda. If I were one of Condi's speechwriters,
I wouldn't throw around the word "deception," and I'd avoid
the whole subject of lying. Why remind people of how they were systematically deceived,
in the rush to war, with tall
tales of imminent danger?
If
the occupation of Iraq wasn't already a crime, then the criminal
ineptitude of "coalition" efforts would make it one. Will
somebody please explain to me why oh why the
U.S. is insisting that the Turks take up a major role
in policing Iraq? The Iraqi Governing Council has come
out against this invitation, but they are being brushed
aside. The Kurds, too, are being swept unceremoniously
under the rug, in spite of the ancient Turko-Kurdish antipathy
that threatens fresh
conflict.
Remember,
it was the Kurds who were supposed to be "liberated" by this
war. Christopher
Hitchens told us so. "Self-determination" for the long
oppressed Kurds! was his battle-cry. What's he saying now?
Just what Bush and
Rummy and Bill Kristol are saying: the media is ignoring
the "good news" from Iraq.
I'm
sure Soviet journalists were telling their people the "good
news" right up until the very end. Just before the Berlin
Wall fell, and the Red Empire imploded, Commie news anchors
were reporting that the Five Year Plan had been over-fulfilled
and the enemies of the Soviet state were on the run. There
was just one problem: it was all a bunch of horse hockey.
The
Soviets paid a lot of attention to propaganda, and poured
billions of rubles into the endless task of persuading their
people that the listless, lifeless, gray world created by
the heirs of Marx and Lenin
was, somehow, in some sense, a workers' paradise. They, too,
believed that it's all a matter of "perception." Depending
on which "filter" one is using, the long-suffering
Soviet people weren't standing in endless bread-lines, they
were marching rapidly along the road to utopia.
The
same willful blindness afflicts our own propagandists. Their
plan to paint Soviet style portraits of heroic workers and
peasants building a New Iraq will make for boring journalism,
and, besides that, it is only a stop-gap measure. In the end,
reality will seep through any "filter." The occupation of
Iraq is simply not sustainable: we don't have the military
and economic resources to do it, even in the short term, never
mind keeping up the effort for 30 to 50 years. It is not economically
sustainable, given the coming cash crunch crisis
of the welfare state, and, I would wager, it is not politically
sustainable for much longer.
President
Bush's reelection prospects hinge on his articulation of an
exit strategy that will allow him to begin extricating the
U.S. gracefully, and all the while claiming it was a great
victory from Iraq. Short of that, I almost feel sorry for
the Republicans.
–
Justin Raimondo
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