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It Takes a Potemkin Village
By FRANK RICH
12/11/05 "New York Times" -- -- WHEN a government substitutes
propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we
don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead,
as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern
what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming
off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its
credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda
techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as
pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least
as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past
32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced
the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers
felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission
Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper
sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over
nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from
which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and
despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech
itself - Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they
once did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News
Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found
that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear
plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have
larger constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual
unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never
accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted
even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up
troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more
important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of
2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the
readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault
on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy
tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded
in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an
authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari,
promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's
inadequate leadership, equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone
except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We
routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and
deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town
meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What
raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation
was the subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated
motive for the address - the release of a 35-page document laying
out a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a
theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during
his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure
was "an unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the
war's inception in "early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York
Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic
version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to
reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What turned up was
the name of the document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke
political scientist who started advising the National Security
Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion
about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan
billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R.
strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the
mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge
of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this
"National Strategy" before its public release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech
fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings
on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure
Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying
off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written
by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time
when American troops in harm's way are desperate for Arabic
translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news
is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi.
So now we know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for
victory, has been consistent since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped
feed spurious accounts of Saddam's W.M.D. to American newspapers to
gin up the war, so his minions now help disseminate happy talk to
his own country's press to further the illusion that the war is
being won.
The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a
Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for
the Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic
aspirations are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more
revealing than those of Mr. Bush's speeches. Look instead at the
cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times revelations. The
administration and its frontmen at once started stonewalling from a
single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John
Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many
press queries. We don't have the facts, they say, even as they
maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for
various Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though
the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian
Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him
on camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all
elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has
had at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking,
short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine
also discovered that Mr. Bailey "was a founder and active
participant in Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising and networking
operation" - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web site -
and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business
address identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale,
with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real
estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government
contracts, could have been lifted from "Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen
Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their
search for "the facts," what we know so far can safely be filed
under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more
we see it's failing for the same reason as the real war:
incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the
occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of
administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's
brother), so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang
for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams
was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a
messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army
commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to
local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so
transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional
scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled
quickly, as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed
outside Falluja on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent
Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within
hours from the fallen's loved ones about how the marines had been
slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a
promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone
else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today
as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11
commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit.
Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her clarifications about
American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors
before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the
president's latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success"
stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don't stand up to the most
rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey
released last week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area
where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent,
only 2 points higher than his rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the
national cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing
anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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