White House has blurred line between fact and fiction
New York: It will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronises 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 without notice: September 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 aluminium tubes meant for nuclear weapons. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”, said Condoleezza Rice, 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 General David Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the spectre 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 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 WMD, this time we’re being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in.
As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend’s precisely timed “surprise” presidential junket: 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.
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 per cent of Iraq’s population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Bush in his January primetime 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.
The “decrease in violence” fable is even more insidious. Though both Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 per cent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those tallies of Saddam’s weapons’ sites once peddled by WHIG. It excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government Accountability Office found overall violence unchanged using the methodology practised by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The White House has ruthlessly undermined any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate WMD findings of the UN weapon experts before the war. Last week the administration was tireless in trashing the non-partisan GAO report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.
But what about the president’s own benchmarks? Remember “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down”? 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 months to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Bush’s former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: ‘‘An Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself ’’.
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. When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House’s propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit meeting 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.
New York Times News Service.
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