By PHK
W is having a fantastic week, at least that’s what the White House press corps and Republican-leaning columnists are repeating ad nauseum in case anyone happened to miss this wonderful news the first time around.
Give me a break. I’m sorry but this is spin at its most repugnant. What about, for instance, the triple suicides at Guantanamo? Remember what happened over the weekend? Or the latest Pew polling results that find the US in even lower esteem abroad than last year?
And is it really all that good news that W decided to drop-by unannounced on Iraq’s President Maliki in the Green Zone yesterday?
In my view, this kind of behavior is at best an embarrassment that demonstrates the worst of all possible manners. Unexpected drop-ins of very good friends in the very small town where I grew up were one thing, but never in my 27 plus year career in the U.S. Foreign Service did I even hear a single rumor of a US President arriving in another country for an official, or an unofficial visit, unannounced.
How would W have liked it if Maliki had tried to do the same thing to him in Washington? I say tried because the White House’s roof is full of sharpshooters armed to the gills to prevent unannounced visitors - friendly or not - from approaching the ramparts.
And we wonder why the rest of the world sees the US occupation of Iraq as akin to the worst vestiges of nineteenth century colonialism. Its way past time that this ride’m cowboy finds the stables, saddles up Pinto and returns to Crawford. Permanently.
Victory is just around which corner? When?
But W’s quicky helicopter drop-in on the US crusader-style fortress in central Baghdad on Tuesday that also houses the Iraqi government - such as it is - belies the fact that the rest of Baghdad is far more dangerous than it was even a few months ago. This according to New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins reporting from the beleaguered city in an interview Tuesday night on the Newshour. Is this something to chalk up as success? To add spring to your step? I don’t think so. Or is this bad news report to be brushed under the carpet because it tells the truth?
This deteriorating situation, however, Mr. Bush, is the reality – in case your nearest and dearest have been too afraid to tell you. An advisor problem I was told Saddam was also afflicted with – bad news is often far more difficult to deliver - so sounds to me as if you both surrounded yourselves with “yes” men and women eager to please.
A ridiculous war on an adjective
Then there’s the trumpeting of Al Zarqawi’s demise: this is more complicated for the simplistic Republican propaganda effort to explain because the spin-meisters can’t admit that the murder of Zarqawi is more than a pyrrhic victory. If they did, the rationale for keeping US troops in Iraq indefinitely would evaporate. Besides, Zarqawi’s successor has already been announced coming seemingly from out of nowhere. So the hunt for yet another dangerous killer will have to begin all over again.
But let’s see, the Republican spin on this one is that staying the course and proving victorious in Iraq is vital to the W led “war on terror” and that those wobbly Democrats just want to cut and run. Excuse me. Zbig Brzezinski described a four-point staged-departure plan on tonight’s Newshour which is heads and shoulders over whatever it is the W administration thinks should happen.
Let’s get this straight once and for all. There is no “war or terror” and there never has been. Terror is an adjective. It is a tactic used by the weak against the strong. Pray tell: how can a country wage war on an adjective? This is just stupid stuff. Too bad we have far too many gullible people in this country who don’t realize it.
But to equate Victory-in-Iraq with winning a war against Islamic militants who use terror as a tactic against the U.S. and others is just wrongheaded. First off, the only Islamic militants who operated in Iraqi territory during Saddam Hussein’s rule were confined to a small mountainous area in the Kurdish area which Saddam’s troops did not control. So Mr. B, Rumsfeld’s wrongheaded “invasion light” and the chaos that followed set Iraq up as ground zero for an influx of Al Qaeda operatives. I notice that uncomfortable fact has long disappeared from the Republican version of the US in Iraq story.
Staying the Victory-in-Iraq course until after November 2006?
Staying the course in Iraq? Try again please. It’s quite clear that the US military presence and its get-rich-quick contractors in the country are part of the problem in this very nasty civil war that you, your neocon pals and fellow-travelers unleashed. If your advisors have not informed you of this elementary fact then find new ones.
As I read the Republican Party’s carefully scripted instructions for use in the now ongoing Congressional debate on “Iraq and the Global War on Terror,” I began to wonder: Is this the opening salvo of yet another pre-election summer full-court press to pull the wool over the American people eyes once again so as to keep a Republican majority in the House to save you from impeachment and your advisors from possible indictment?
And if so, will the vestiges of what used to be a liberal MSM and what is being portrayed in the press as a disunited Democratic Party play along? I hope not.