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As the Iraqis Stand
Down,...We'll Stand Up
By FRANK RICH
09/10/07 "NY
Times" Op-Ed: September 9, 2007 -- 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 New York Times
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