|
Didn't See It Coming, Again
By Maureen Dowd
02/02/06 "New
York Times" -- - - The White House should hire an
anthropologist.
Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them
improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the
Bush foreign policy team doesn't understand any of the markets
where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and
democracy.
The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state
of the union is sour but the state of the world is chilling,
thanks to a hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that
was once billed as a seasoned "dream team."
The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to
tempestuous parts of the world, the more it discovers that you
may be able to spin and scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle
East is not so easy to manipulate. W. believes in
self-determination only if he's doing the determining.
Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but
elsewhere they're violently opposing him.
It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our
government could be even more culturally illiterate and
pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on
Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.
One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" —
assuming other cultures think like us — doesn't work would be a
lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence
agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything
from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to
Osama's hiding place to the Hamas victory.
Bush officials keep claiming they couldn't have anticipated
disasters — from the terrorist attacks to Katrina — even when
they got specific warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake
nuclear threat in Iraq, they misplayed the real ones in Iran and
North Korea. In London Sunday, Condi Rice admitted that all of
our diplomats and spies were caught off guard by the Hamas win.
"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," she said. "It does say
something about us not having a good enough pulse."
Instead of paying the Lincoln Group millions to plant fake
newspaper stories in Iraq, the Bush team might try reading real
newspaper stories here. Instead of simply believing any fact
that makes him feel self-important, the president might try
reading history.
Like many other presidential candidates I've interviewed, W.
said he liked Winston Churchill. But if he really had read
Churchill, he would at least have understood that the Middle
East never turns out the way you expect. Churchill, who called
Iraq "an ungrateful volcano," would not have been surprised by
the new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll showing that close to half
of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces.
The State of the Union is a non-event. But Bob Woodruff and his
cameraman, Doug Vogt, being blown up by a roadside bomb has
forced the media to focus on what the Bushies try to hide — all
the injured and maimed coming home from Iraq.
Mark Landler's Times piece noted that the ABC journalists came
to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, "on a military transport
plane carrying 31 wounded soldiers — about a normal daily influx
for this hospital."
As Denise Grady wrote in The Times, the survival rate in Iraq is
higher than in other wars, but the wounds are multiple and
awful: "combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision
and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled
limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic
stress."
The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five
oblivious years, about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton
and Exxon are swimming in profits — Exxon's revenues were bigger
than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia or
Indonesia — was rich.
A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq "a
black hole." The "spiraling security disaster," she told Larry
King, had robbed Iraqis of hope, "and by any indication whether
you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether
you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded,
whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and
wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse
and worse."
But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a
Middle East country — and flipping the balance of power from one
sect to another — without enough troops to secure it could go
wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
