[lit-ideas] There's more than one way to skin a cat, by God.
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:03:33 -0600
MAYBE the Bush White House can't conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned
its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned
reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the
administration try to get its story straight about Iran's role in Iraq last
week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving
while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold
the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost
its mojo.
Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military
officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last
Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the
whole charade. General Pace said he didn't know about the briefing and couldn't
endorse its contention that the Iranian government's highest echelons were
complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium
ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to
revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read
verbatim from the same script. Last week's frantic improvisations were vintage
Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.
Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating
indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in
official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else
seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same
alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.
In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and
intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that "U.S. forces
intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive
devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American
vehicles." Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs
currently called E.F.P.'s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they
were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran's Revolutionary
Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was
directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the
same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Timing is everything in propaganda, as in all showmanship. So why would the
White House pick this particular moment to mount such an extravagant rerun of
old news, complete with photos and props reminiscent of Colin Powell's infamous
presentation of prewar intelligence? Yes, the death toll from these bombs is
rising, but it has been rising for some time. (Also rising, and more
dramatically, is the death toll from attacks on American helicopters.)
After General Pace rendered inoperative the first official rationale for last
Sunday's E.F.P. briefing, President Bush had to find a new explanation for his
sudden focus on the Iranian explosives. That's why he said at Wednesday's news
conference that it no longer mattered whether the Iranian government (as
opposed to black marketeers or freelance thugs) had supplied these weapons to
Iraqi killers. "What matters is, is that they're there," he said. The real
point of hyping this inexact intelligence was to justify why he had to take
urgent action now, no matter what the E.F.P.'s provenance: "My job is to
protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are
hurting our troops, we're going to do something about it, pure and simple."
Darn right! But if the administration has warned about these weapons twice in
the past 18 months (and had known "that they're there," we now know, since
2003), why is Mr. Bush just stepping up to that job at this late date?
Embarrassingly enough, The Washington Post reported on its front page last
Monday - the same front page with news of the Baghdad E.F.P. briefing - that
there is now a shortfall of "thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed
to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs." Worse, the full armor upgrade
"is not scheduled to be completed until this summer." So Mr. Bush's idea of
doing something about it, "pure and simple" is itself a lie, since he is doing
something about it only after he has knowingly sent a new round of underarmored
American troops into battle.
To those who are most suspicious of this White House, the "something" that Mr.
Bush really wants to do has little to do with armor in any case. His real aim
is to provoke war with Iran, no matter how overstretched and ill-equipped our
armed forces may be for that added burden. By this line of thinking, the run-up
to the war in Iraq is now repeating itself exactly and Mr. Bush will seize any
handy casus belli he can to ignite a conflagration in Iran.
Iran is an unquestionable menace with an Israel-hating fanatic as its
president. It is also four times the size of Iraq and a far more dangerous
adversary than was Saddam's regime. Perhaps Mr. Bush is as reckless as his
harshest critics claim and will double down on catastrophe. But for those who
don't hold quite so pitch-black a view of his intentions, there's a less
apocalyptic motive to be considered as well.
Let's not forget that the White House's stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing
news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is
always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the
White House's political interests. When the Democrats were gaining campaign
traction in 2004, John Ashcroft held an urgent news conference to display
photos of seven suspected terrorists on the loose. He didn't bother to explain
that six of them had been announced previously, one at a news conference he had
held 28 months earlier. Mr. Bush played the same trick last February as newly
declassified statistics at a Senate hearing revealed a steady three-year growth
in insurgent attacks: he breathlessly announced a thwarted Qaeda plot against
the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles that had already been revealed by the
administration four months before.
We know what Mr. Bush wants to distract us from this time: Congressional votes
against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general's
report deploring Douglas Feith's fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and
dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into
the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.
That same intelligence estimate also says that Iran is "not likely to be a
major driver of violence" in Iraq, but no matter. If the president can now whip
up a Feith-style smoke screen of innuendo to imply that Iran is the root of all
our woes in the war - and give "the enemy" a single recognizable face
(Ahmadinejad as the new Saddam) - then, ipso facto, he is not guilty of sending
troops into the middle of a shadowy Sunni-Shiite bloodbath after all.
Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam's
(nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al
Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the
Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran. Mr. Bush
keeps saying that his saber rattling about Iran is not "a pretext for war."
Maybe so, but at the very least it's a pretext for prolonging the disastrous
war we already have.
What makes his spin brazen even by his standards is that Iran is in fact
steadily extending its influence in Iraq - thanks to its alliance with the very
Iraqi politicians that Mr. Bush himself has endorsed. In December the president
welcomed a Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to the White House with great
fanfare; just three weeks later American forces had to raid Mr. Hakim's Iraq
compound to arrest Iranian operatives suspected of planning attacks against
American military forces, possibly with E.F.P.'s. As if that weren't bad
enough, Nuri al-Maliki's government promptly overruled the American arrests and
ordered the operatives' release so they could escape to Iran. For all his
bluster about doing something about it, Mr. Bush did nothing.
It gets worse. This month we learned that yet another Maliki supporter in the
Iraqi Parliament, Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, was convicted more than
two decades ago of planning the murderous 1983 attacks on the American and
French Embassies in Kuwait. He's now in Iran, but before leaving, this
terrorist served as a security adviser, no less, to the first Iraqi prime
minister after the American invasion, Ibrahim al-Jafaari. Mr. Jafaari, hailed
by Mr. Bush as "a strong partner for peace and freedom" during his own White
House visit in 2005, could be found last week in Tehran, celebrating the
anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution and criticizing America's arrest of
Iranian officials in Iraq.
Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it's hard to
imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth.
When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while
simultaneously empowering it, you've got another remake of "The Manchurian
Candidate," this time played for keeps.
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