Re: decoding the spin
- From: Thumper <jaylsmith@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:24:35 -0400
On 11 Sep 2007 18:18:32 GMT, awouk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (arthur wouk)
wrote:
As the Iraqis Stand Down, Well Stand Up
By FRANK RICH
IT will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again
synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an
attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on
another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8,
2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for
the administration's latest scam.
That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its
fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk
shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article
amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought
to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a
sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.
What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence,
fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists,
presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been
plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group
(WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con
job.
Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive
that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus
and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every
particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear holocaust" has been
rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.
The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the
last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer.
White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated
in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked
intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good
cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's
pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before
setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once
again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.
As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are
paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed
"surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success "on
the ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily
fortified American base.
A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those
bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries
whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at
least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a
few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the
shopkeepers. "This is General Petraeus's baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told
The Post. "Personally, I think it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer
said that even shops that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are
included in the Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.
One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a
Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green
Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's
spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she
told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster
tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of
talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."
In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful
antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military
in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq's
population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which
was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech
announcing the surge.
Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former Saddamists who
may have American blood on their hands, the chances of this "bottom up" model
replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population is almost exclusively Sunni.
Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by the Sunni-Shiite and Shiite-Shiite
civil wars that are M.I.A. in White House talking points.
The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General
Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75
percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked
as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG. As The
Washington Post reported on Thursday, it excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and
Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government Accountability Office, which rejected
that fuzzy math, found overall violence unchanged using the methodology
practiced by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own
data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that can't be
divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House
will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its
propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United
Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war.
General Petraeus intervened to soften last month's harsh National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Last week the administration and its
ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O.
report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.
Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But
what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up,
we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi
Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three
years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the
Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police
chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18
months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt
from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down
benchmarks for measuring success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain
itself and defend itself." On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.
What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even
after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its
fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon and
Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York
Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian
fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off
as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not
mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a
Department of Defense itinerary.
But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent
observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in
these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon
junketeers. Unlike Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist who
clandestinely received big government bucks to "regularly comment" on No
Child Left Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what you can get
free? Two weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The Washington Post op-ed
page, again pushing rosy Iraq scenarios, including an upbeat prognosis for
economic reconstruction, even though the G.A.O. found that little of the $10
billion earmarked for reconstruction is likely to be spent.
Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed
to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as
Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a
bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of
American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's
bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls
"Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in
Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5
percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The
Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars
and Stripes.
Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's corporate
sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more trustworthy. Rob
Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves in the Marine Reserve,
invited American troops in Iraq to speak candidly about the Iraqi
Parliament's vacation.
When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the
White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder
President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit
after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia's deputy
prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This war has now gone on so long
that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he
taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American
military fatalities ago.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Brilliant.
Thumper
.
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