Needlenose

From the Department of Reinvented Reality — heck, let’s just go ahead and call it the Ministry of Truth — comes this revelation in today’s New York Times:

“George W. Bush was standing three feet from his television screen in his cabin at Camp David last weekend, absorbed in every detail of the news from Iraq, when a correspondent came on to report that the president of the United States, according to White House officials, was not glued to the TV. . . .

In the opening days of the conflict. . . Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, at first suggested that Mr. Bush was not even watching the enormous blasts on live television of the first bombs thundering down on Baghdad. Mr. Fleischer said later that the president had indeed been watching television. The reality is that the war now dominates the White House and the president’s life.”

Wow. I haven’t seen spin like this since Linda Blair in The Exorcist!

In the debate over how far the war in Iraq has gone astray from the White House’s initial expectations, this 180-degree turn in George W.’s image management is clearly damning proof.

At first, the desire was to maintain the longstanding illusion of a CEO president — “a confident executive who is leaving the management of the war to his generals,” as the New York Times article puts it. But that image only works if the war plan is moving ahead effortlessly.

If the delays and casualties are piling up, then such “confident” detachment comes across as callous indifference, or helplessness. And so the effort has been launched to remake Bush as a hands-on, detail-oriented wartime President. And in keeping with the Orwellian model the administration has adopted as its blueprint for governing, the message is that not only is Bush currently fully engaged and immersed in guiding the war effort, he always has been fully engaged and immersed… even when the administration was explicitly claiming he wasn’t.

Bush as “Delphic”
Bush as hyperengaged
Seymour Hersh articleWith thanks to the Guardian for finding this:

“”The planners are in the central command. . . . They come up with their proposals and I think you’ll find that if you ask anyone who’s been involved in the process from the central command that every single thing they’ve requested has in fact happened.”
– Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, denying accusations that he had “micromanaged” troop deployments for the war in Iraq

“Pentagon officials say orders such as No 177 are normally reviewed thoroughly in advance and fly across a defense chief’s desk. But with every step America takes toward war with Iraq, which could be as little as a month off, Rumsfeld is doing things his own meticulous way. . . . Over the past few weeks, he has been holding up deployment papers at the last minute, demanding answers and explanations about which units are going where, why.“
– Time magazine, January 2003, in a profile of Rumsfeld

Links for a followup post:
we can’t find any chemical weapons
North Korea is taking a different lesson
surprise at the depth of Arab anger (last paragraph in story)
Shiites waiting to rebel… against the U.S.
preemption may extend to North Korea
China beginning to lean on North Korea“The enemy that we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we’d war gamed against.”
– U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of an Army corps in Iraq

Alert journalists like =http://slate.msn.com/id/2080814Fred Kaplan[/url] and Joshua Marshall have already jumped expertly on this revealing quote. You see, that aside about the enemy “we’d war gamed against” carries extra meaning to anyone who remembers a minor controversy last summer, in which (as Kaplan describes) “militia fighters did play a crucial role in a major war game designed to simulate combat in Iraq—but the Pentagon officials who managed the game simply disregarded or overruled the militias’ most devastating moves.”

This seeming effort to cover up flaws in the game plan caused the general playing the role of Saddam Hussein to quit participating, and to complain in press interviews and private emails about the danger of sending troops into battle in the service of theories that hadn’t been properly tested. Now that “Shock and Awe” =http://slate.msn.com/id/2080745has apparently failed[/url], and military leaders are saying “that they effectively need to restart the war,” it’s clear his warnings should have drawn more attention last summer.

It’s like the conservatives keep telling us when they talk about capitalism — competition is a good thing; it ensures that only the good ideas rise to the top. Only they don’t seem to apply it very well to themselves and their ideas.

I mean, really — could this war have been developed in an environment of fewer reality checks? From Perle, Wolfowitz et al. developing their theories in the comfort of well-funded right-wing think tanks, to the war college where “Shock and Awe” was hatched, to the rigged war games, to Rumsfeld using his secretarial rank to steamroll experienced generals into accepting smaller forces than they felt were necessary, everything about the invasion was developed in conceptual isolation and shielded from competition at all times.

So is it really any surprise that things have turned out so much differently than the geniuses in their bureaucratic bubbles expected?

Is the Global Crossing scandal the real reason for Perle’s “resignation” or is the Administration even now beginning its Nixonian retreat?Is the Global Crossing scandal the real reason for Richard Perle’s “resignation” or is the Administration even now beginning its Nixonian backpedal on the war? As swopa indicated, Perle and his cronies were the architects of the President’s current America Uber Alles Middle East strategy.

Now that its become apparent that the Iraqi people aren’t going to rise up yet again ( fool me once…) against their oppressive governement, and of course the Iraqi army isn’t surrendering in droves, Perle may have lost his luster. Perhaps Dubya is following the footsteps of another great Republican, Richard Nixon, and is ousting Perle as a first step in a strategic retreat from a whacked-out Middle East reverse-domino strategy. One can only hope!

Evangelical christians are the biggest backers of Dubya’s war…are they reading the same bible?Apparently, evangelical christians are the biggest backers of the invasion of Iraq. In a recent poll, a large majority of the literal translation set indicated not only support for the U.S. attack on Baghdad, but also supported Sharon’s crackdown on the Muslims in the occupied territories.

Many of these folks support the war because they see it as the beginning of the “end-times” as they interpret biblical prophesies. This ties in with an even creepier link between American “Fundees” and Israel – programs such as “On Wings of Eagles that fund the emigration of Russian and other Jews to Israel. Philanthropic? Think again – the Fundees merely want to hasten the “end-times” by fulfilling one of the end-time prophesies; namely, the return of all Jews to Israel.

But the question of Israel aside, Fundee support of the war brings up one of those strange paradoxes of Christianity – when is it okay to kill? In my reading of the New Testament, Jesus appears pretty clear on the subject of violence (brandishing a whip at the money-changers aside): “turn the other cheek,” “love thy enemies,” etc. It’s the Old Testament that’s chock-full of vengence slayings, ethnic cleansing, enslaving your enemy and the like. But isn’t the New Testament supposed to over-ride the teachings of the Old Testament? Did I miss something?

Perhaps it’s time for the Fundees to scrape off their “What Would Jesus Do?” bumperstickers and replace them with a new motto more fitting to their atavistic beliefs: Who Would Jesus Kill?

Just over a week into the invasion of Iraq, the euphoria (a sadly appropriate word) of the media and war hawks over “=http://slate.msn.com/id/2080745Shock and Awe[/url]” has faded, the brutal reality of war is coming into focus for the troops themselves, and the administration has stopped talking of an easy victory. Military commanders are calling off the blitzkrieg and saying they need time to regroup.

Why? Well, there’s nothing good about the suffering of Iraqi civilians, or more deaths of soldiers on either side. But a swift triumph would have caused the armchair emperors in the White House to accelerate their Austin Powers-esque dreams of world domination, identifying the next regime to be targeted for change. Meaning that each life saved in Iraq will be lost many times over in Iran, North Korea, or wherever the spinner on the “Axis of Evil” stops next.

But Bush can’t “send in the Marines” elsewhere as long as they’re tied up in garrison duty in Iraq. Nor can he start the lengthy public vilification of the next dictator he wants to oust until Saddam Hussein is finally deposed. And the more Iraq comes to resemble Vietnam (see Green Boy’s post below), however briefly, the queasier Americans are going to become about further military adventures. Witnessing a brutal siege of Baghdad, with civilians alternately starving in the streets or being slaughtered in the uprisings the U.S. forces will await before attacking themselves, will make them even more uncomfortable.

All in all, it’s going to be nearly impossible for Bush to pull off launching another war before the 2004 election without coming across like a bloodthirsty madman the likes of which even Fox News viewers probably aren’t ready to accept. And as the bill for this international display of testosterone keeps coming due, more rational voters heading for the polls will be looking for a way out — a path away from the cycle of death, and a chance to start undoing the damage Bush has done.

Today “Hearts and Minds,” tomorrow…the “Strategic Hamlet?”
It’s a bit eery but as if on queue an old term from America’s failed war in Vietnam has sprung to the lips of journalists nationwide. Before the invasion, of course, the mainstream media gushed over Dubya’s feeble and ineffective attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of the Islamic world. Now we’re flooded with stories about how a “politically correct” war where the U.S. hopes to win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people is costing us lives.

It all sounds so very noble. However, anybody who either lived through the Vietnam War or at least bothered to see a TV documentary about it would know that our humanitarian intervention to protect the South Vietnamese not only failed to win their hearts and minds, but also eventually managed to lose their country as well.

What can we expect next? A “strategic hamlets” progam lead by an appointed government to pacify the country during occupation?

Al Qaeda aided in clever attempt to bankrupt the U.S. by “Keystone Congress”Wrong-wingers usually credit Ronald Reagan with the demise of the Soviet Union. His brilliant strategy, their thinking goes, was to spend tremendous amounts of money on the U.S. war machine, running up an astronomical budget deficit in the process. With its decaying economy, the Soviet Union would be unable to keep up with the spending of the world’s capitalist superpower.

I seriously doubt Reagan even knew where he was half the time, so I certainly don’t believe that he crafted such an amazing “end game” victory strategy. But that’s how events played out – the Soviets tried to play a game of military-industrial keep-up-with-the-Joneses, and bankrupted their economy in the process.

So will Osama Bin Laden be similarly credited someday for the economic destruction of the U.S?

Keep your eyes on the war, not on Congress passing huge tax cuts for the wealthy!While the eyes of the nation stay glued to the All War Channel (FoxNews), Congress has seized the opportunity to pass a $350 Billion tax cut plan whose savings will mostly go to the fabulously wealthy top %1 income earners (that would be billionares and multi-millionaires for those of you unfamiliar with the math). What is particularly galling is the spin put on it by the wrong-wing biased media, calling it a “major victory for the Democrats.” Major victory? A =http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/02/03/bush.budgetrecord budget deficit[/url] that will, over the coming years, break Social Security and other social safety-net programs? While economic powerhouse states like California are still reeling from the deepening recession and the Texas-based energy company market rip-offs?

On an almost humorous note, on the same day Dubya presented Congress with a $75 Billion dollar bill for the war effort, not including the costs of reconstruction, occupation or bringing back U.S. military forces (and based on the optimistic assumption of a 60-day conflict). Perhaps the Administration is planning on privatizing the reconstruction effort, enlisting Clear Channel Communications to organize charity concerts for funding the reconstruction and employing an all-volunteer army of christian fundamentalist war supporters as occupation forces – who knows? In this year of topsey-turveydom apparently anything can happen!

Next time a wrong-winger rants about liberal bias in the media, tell ‘em how Clear Channel has been promoting the invasion of IraqNext time a wrong-winger rants on and on about liberal bias in the media, point out how Clear Channel has been promoting the invasion of Iraq. In fact, to bolster preposterous Administration claims of overwhelming U.S. support of Operation Enduring Injustice despite the clear lack of any visible indication of such support, Clear Channel Communications has stepped up to the plate to create pro-war rallies across the country.

Perhaps this is quid-pro-quo to bolster FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s further deregulation of the media that favors the growth of media giants to the exclusion of smaller players, and is leading to a monoculture of (wrong-leaning) political views – deregulation that will clearly benefit Clear Channel.