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In what
appears to be a summer of discontent, Americans (and the global audience) are being
subjected to excessive amounts of damage control aimed at confusing the voting
public that Bush’s war is not failing, that the economy is not troubling, given
the jobs market and trade deficit, or that when it comes down to it, the
Bush-Cheney administration has a very real credibility problem, one they
planted, grew and harvested themselves. Sometimes it
is difficult to believe that twice in one lifetime we are living through an
administration so involved in the tangle of lies and hidden motives of war. It
is not surprising that the anti war movement sprung up much sooner this time, but
even with the impact of 9/11, it is vexing that there remains a palpable fear
of discussing lies told by the president, that people are reluctant, after all
the bitter cynicism of our recent history that many are reluctant to face the
truth, some actively avoiding the realization they believed those lies. Following this
commentary are current headlines that address the growing gap between reality,
or at least objectivity, and the incompetent dishonesty of those who should be
held accountable, if for no other reason than they made such an issue of
responsibility and accountability themselves. It’s past time we hold them to
their own standards. If Pres. Bush held monthly public progress reports, as has
been suggested, it might do something to improve his credibility, but it still
does not address accountability for the lies and deception. In a democracy, an
administration dedicated to secrecy and infallibility generates its own
downfall. - KwC Blinded by the Light at the End of the Tunnel by
Sidney Blumenthal, June 23, 2005, Guardian UK and Commondreams.org On June 21, network news reported that the Pentagon had claimed
that 47 enemy operatives had been killed in Operation Spear in western Iraq.
Last month, the Pentagon declared 125 had been killed in Operation Matador,
near the Syrian border. "We don't do body counts on other people,"
Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, stated in November 2003. On January 29 this
year, the day before the Iraqi election, President Bush announced that it was
the "turning point". On May 2 2003, he stood on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln behind a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" and the
next day proclaimed that the "mission is completed". On June 2 this
year, he declared: "Our mission is clear there, as well, and that is to
train the Iraqis so they can do the fighting." Last week, Bush retreated to his ultimate
justification, that Iraq was invaded because Saddam Hussein was involved with
the terrorists behind the September 11 attacks, a notion believed by a majority
of those who voted for him in 2004: "We went to war because we were attacked
..." On March 16 2003, Dick
Cheney, the vice-president, prophesied: "We will, in fact, be greeted as
liberators ... I think it will go relatively quickly." Only last month
Cheney assured us that the insurgency in Iraq is in "the last throes".
On June 18, General William Webster, the US commander in Baghdad, said:
"Certainly saying anything about 'breaking the back' or 'about to reach
the end of the line' or those kinds of things do not apply to the insurgency at
this point." The war has reached a tipping
point - not in Iraq, but in the US. Every announcement of a "turning
point" heightens the rising tide of public disillusionment. Every
reference to September 11 strains the administration's credibility. Every
revelation of how "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy" for war, as in the Downing Street memo, shatters even Republicans'
previously implacable faith. On June 21, a Gallup
poll reported that Bush's approval rating was collapsing along with support for
the war. Only 39% of Americans support it. "The decline in support for the
war is found among Republicans and independents, with little change among
Democrats." (Since March, Republican support has fallen 11 points to 70%.)
"They're starting
to talk numbers again," Pat Lang remarked to me about the return of body
counts. Lang is the former chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency for the
Middle East, south Asia and counter-terrorism. "They were determined not
to do that. But they can't provide a measurement to tell themselves they're
doing well. As you know, it means nothing." Lang, who served as an
intelligence officer in Vietnam, observes: "For almost all of the war, Vietnam was a better situation than Iraq.
During the conduct of the war the security situation was far better than this."
The Iraqi elections are "irrelevant to
the outcome of the war because the people who voted were the people who stood
to gain". Iran
is the long-term winner.
"Iran intends to pull the Shia state of Iraq into its orbit. You can be
sure that Iranian revolutionary guards are honeycombed throughout Iraq's
intelligence to make sure things don't get out of hand." About the
"euphoria" after the election, especially echoed by the press corps,
Lang simply says: "Laughable, comical, pathetic." Bush's
Iraq syndrome is a reinvention of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam syndrome. In December 1967, Walt Rostow, LBJ's
national security adviser, famously declared about the Vietcong and the North
Vietnamese: "Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain
... I see light at the end of the tunnel." The official invitation to the
New Year's Eve party at the US embassy in Saigon read: "Come see the light
at the end of the tunnel." The Tet offensive struck a month later. "Even when what
happened was really more positive than it seemed to be - the Tet offensive in
1968 was a military disaster for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army - no
one believed it because there was no light at the end of tunnel," Harry
McPherson, who was President Johnson's counsel in the White House, told me. For
a modern instance, McPherson cited the statement this week by Chuck Hagel, a
Republican senator from Nebraska: "The
White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just
making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."
Bush's
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision can only accelerate the cycle of
disillusionment.
His instinctive triumphalism inevitably has a
counter-productive effect. His refusal to insist on responsibility for blunders
- indeed, rewarding and honoring their perpetrators - enshrines impunity and
hubris. His doctrine of
presidential infallibility, the election being his only "moment of
accountability", can no longer be sustained by reference to September 11.
His defense of the abuse and torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other
prisons in violation of laws formerly upheld by the US blots out his attempts
to explain the purity of his motives. In The Quiet American, Graham Greene's 1955
novel on the wages of naive arrogance in Vietnam, the world-weary British
journalist Fowler remarks to Pyle, the US agent, with the best of intentions:
"Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are ... I wish sometimes
you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human
beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle." Sidney
Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars. Article found at http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0623-26.htm Original http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5221961-103677,00.html The frightening evolution of Al Qaida: “In interview after interview with
officials of the U.S., French, Spanish, British and Saudi counterterrorism
efforts, that is now the accepted wisdom. No one is optimistic the death or
capture of bin Laden would significantly change the landscape of terrorism,
although on a positive note, no one is complacent either. As one British
diplomat put it, “The U.S. is winning the
war on al-Qaida but losing the war on terrorism — and the reason is Iraq.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8307333/ Top Commander disputes VP claims about Iraq
insurgency The top American military commander in the Persian Gulf
disputed a contention by Vice President Dick Cheney that the Iraqi insurgency
was in its "last throes" and told Congress on Thursday its strength
was basically undiminished from six months ago. Furthermore, Gen. John Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services
Committee, "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq
than there were six months ago.” Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's
senior Democrat, asked Abizaid if he realized he was contradicting Cheney. "I don't know that I would make any
comment about that other than to say there's a lot of work to be done,"
said Abizaid. "I gave you my opinion." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/ats-ap_top12jun23,0,1230576.story Friedman: Run, Dick, Run. Pres.
Bush has a Dick Cheney problem. “If Mr. Bush's hope is to make the
Republican Party into a permanent majority party and sustain his legacy, he
would have picked a handful of significant proposals to widen the party's circle
- especially with the Democrats so clearly out of ideas. But instead of widening and broadening, by
focusing on getting things accomplished that would benefit the vast middle of
the country, Mr. Bush is catering to right-wing fetishes. If this is how he intends to use his political capital,
that's his business. But if Mr. Bush had a vice president with an eye on 2008,
I have to believe he or she would be saying to the president right now:
"Hey boss. What are you doing? Where are you going? How am I going to get
elected running on this dog's breakfast of antiscience, head-in-the-sand
policies?" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/opinion/22friedman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fThomas%20L%20Friedman Norman Soloman: Voluntary Amnesia in service of war. Forget it! That seems to be an unstated
motto for American media coverage of the Iranian presidential election. The
axiom comes down to: “Don’t let history get in the way of spin.” Evasion
smoothes the way to the next war. For maximum propaganda effect, the
agenda-setting must be decoupled as much as possible from clear truths -- about
the current president’s mendacity in connection with Iraq, and about the record
of U.S. government actions toward Iran. While a
seriously discredited President Bush strains to do damage control about his
past lies and present machinations on Iraq, the U.S. media coverage typically
presents his statements about Iran without so much as a whiff of suspicion. A
proven liar is treated like a presumptive truth-teller. The
ambient noise of American media evokes history -- distant or recent -- as an
option we may choose to decline, like mustard on a burger. We’re encouraged to mentally disconnect from relevant historic
events. Double standards prevail. Red-white-and-blue
journalists don’t doubt that the past sins of Washington’s present-day foes are
quite relevant today. So, it’s assumed to be incisive when reporters keep
reminding news consumers that Saddam Hussein committed huge crimes such as mass
killing of Kurds. But what about the fact
that most of the worst of those crimes occurred while the United States was
supportive of Hussein’s regime? That question gets short shrift. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0623-32.htm Miami Herald’s Steinbeck:
Americans inching closer to a reckoning on
war: “You're
in one camp or the other. Either you want to
know if you've been lied to, or you don't. After the Congressional DSM briefing, Rep.
Conyers carried a letter to the White House, signed by more than 120 House
members, asking for answers to questions provoked by the Downing Street Memo.
Not only was
Conyers rebuffed, he was slighted.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, in a press briefing that
day, dismissed Conyers as ``an individual who voted against the war in the
first place and is simply trying to rehash old debates that have already been
addressed.'' Did you catch the
irony? Conyers has no credibility to challenge the president's actions toward
Iraq, the White House argues, because Conyers has opposed the war from the
beginning. Yet just a few months ago, the
Bush people ridiculed Sen. John Kerry because Kerry allegedly supported the war
before being against it -- remember all the giddy supporters chanting
``Flip-flop! Flip-flop!'' Clearly, whether you've always opposed Iraq or
recently reached that conclusion, Team Bush thinks you're irrelevant. That's
not leadership; that's obstinacy.
McClellan's comment helps to bring into focus why, for example, no one at the
White House listened to then-National Security Council advisor Richard Clarke's
warnings about al Qaeda before 9/11, nor his arguments afterward that Iraq had
nothing to do it. We can see now why then-Secretary of State Powell, who warned
about getting mired in Iraq, had to go. It becomes more clear why no White
House insider has been disciplined for leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's
name to the press, after her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson, revealed that
Bush used an already-discredited whopper about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium
ore in his 2003 State of the Union speech. It explains why Bush is standing by
his nomination of John Bolton to the U.N. despite Bolton's alleged attempts to
pressure intelligence agents into supporting White House policies.” http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/robert_steinback/11952371.htm Mail scanned
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