From the heartland...
Orwell Goes to War
Des Moines Register Editorial
Friday 08 October 2004
We live in Orwellian times, where obvious falsehoods are asserted brazenly as the truth.
The day after the final report of the Iraq Survey Group confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no active programs to produce them, Vice President Dick Cheney blithely asserted that the report justified the invasion of Iraq.
No, Mr. Vice President, the report shattered the last forlorn hope that the war was necessary. It established that Iraq posed no threat to the United States before the 2003 invasion or any time in the foreseeable future. President Bush, on the very day the report was issued, said, "There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks."
No, Mr. President, you don't seem to get it. Saddam had no weapons or materials to give. The chemical and biological weapons were destroyed years ago, and Iraq's capacity to develop nuclear weapons was actually deteriorating at the time of the invasion. Not to mention that Saddam had no meaningful ties with terrorists. On Thursday, Bush dropped the reference to weapons but continued to insist Saddam had knowledge of weapons that could have been given to terrorists. That's knowledge anyone can get off the Internet.
When the United States was gearing up to invade, United Nations arms inspectors were in Iraq. If they had been allowed a few more months to complete their work, they would have discovered what the post-invasion inspectors now report - that Iraq had no stockpiles or active programs involving weapons of mass destruction. But President Bush insisted the invasion couldn't wait. He described a "grave and immediate threat" from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. During the futile search for weapons after the invasion, the words changed in an Orwellian rewriting of the justification. "Immediate threat" was downgraded to just a "threat" and then to a "gathering threat." Now it's clear there was no threat, gathering or otherwise.
Similarly, the words about weapons changed. The president and his advisers asserted with absolute certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When no weapons turned up, they insisted Iraq had weapons programs . When no evidence of programs was found, they spoke of "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Orwell must have been grimacing in his grave. The kindest interpretation of events is that the president was the victim of faulty intelligence - that he did what he thought was right to protect the country on the basis of bad information. The unkindest interpretation is that he deluded himself and the nation by selectively believing only the intelligence that supported a preconceived fixation on invading Iraq.
Either way, the invasion will go down as one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in American history. It does not diminish the sacrifices of America's magnificent soldiers, nor does it deny that Saddam was a brutal thug, to recognize that the security of the United States was not enhanced by the invasion of Iraq. It is a tragedy that compounds every day because each day it looks increasingly less likely that the Middle East will end up being a better place in the aftermath.
It's an awful dilemma. If American troops are withdrawn, Iraq is likely to disintegrate into a civil war that could produce a terrorist regime. The invasion will have created the very thing it was supposed to have prevented. But the longer American troops stay, the more intense the anti-American insurgency becomes. How many more American lives will be lost trying to establish stability in an inherently unstable situation? Neither President Bush nor his opponent, John Kerry, has put forward a credible solution to the dilemma. But a solution must be found, and the search must begin by acknowledging reality.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Bush's Isolation from Reporters Could Be a Hindrance
By Mike Allen
The Washington Post
Friday 08 October 2004
Some Presidential advisers worry that he could pay price during debates for being overprotected.
During a campaign forum in the Cleveland suburbs last month, President Bush was asked whether he likes broccoli, to disclose his "most important legacy to the American people" and to reveal what supporters can do "to make sure that you win Ohio and get reelected."
The "Ask President Bush" forums, which on television look like freewheeling sessions with the commander in chief, are tightly managed by the Bush-Cheney campaign, with the president calling mainly on people sitting in sections filled with his most loyal supporters. At one such event, a veteran's question was whether Bush would permit him "the honor of giving our commander in chief a real Navy salute, and not a flip-flop."
Several Bush advisers said the president may well pay a price for his decision to remain isolated from tough or unexpected questions when he faces Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), whose events are notably less scripted, in a town-hall-style debate tonight at Washington University in St. Louis. The questions are likely to be tougher than those he faced when he taped an interview about parenting for the "Dr. Phil" show this summer.
The debates, which will conclude Wednesday in Arizona, have brought new scrutiny to Bush by tens of millions of people who are accustomed to seeing him only in brief clips or formal settings. Bush received poor ratings in polls after television shots from the first debate showed him fidgeting and grimacing under challenges by Kerry, and his remarks became repetitious and at times peevish.
Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University, said the first debate showed Bush had been overprotected. "If you don't talk to the press and deal with audiences with some degree of skepticism, you can't build understanding so people have confidence in you in hard times," Fields said. "His handlers think they're doing him a favor, but they're not."
Bush has granted three interviews in the past five weeks, to conservative Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader and WMUR-TV in New Hampshire. Several national news organizations were being considered for interviews after the Republican National Convention, but the interviews did not occur after Bush took a temporary lead over Kerry in polls. Other interviews are still being considered, his staff said.
The president has stopped taking questions from the small pool of reporters who cover his photo opportunities, and he has answered questions from the White House press corps twice since Aug. 23, both times with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side. His last prime-time news conference was April 13.
The tradition of the White House news corps shouting questions at the president has largely faded during this term because Bush reacts testily and does not answer, and his staff typically sets up events so he does not have to walk near reporters.
Tonight's town-hall audience of about 100 will ask 15 to 20 questions and will consist of an equal number of voters who say they lean toward Bush or Kerry but could change their minds, plus a few who say they are undecided. Bush's debate negotiators had sought to eliminate the event from the debate schedule because they were concerned that partisans could pose as uncommitted voters and slip in with tough or argumentative questions.
Although all presidents are kept somewhat removed from reality because of security concerns and their staffs' impulse for burnishing their image, Bush's campaign has taken unprecedented steps to shield him from dissenters and even from curious, undecided voters. On the way to the forum outside Cleveland, the media buses that went ahead of Bush were temporarily marooned in a church parking lot because police had been told to divert all buses since they could contain demonstrators.
Bush's handlers have pulled the presidential bubble especially tight during the campaign, but he often has kept his distance from the public and the media throughout his term. He rarely plays tourist on trips, and has held the fewest solo news conferences of any president since records were kept.
Bush has held 15 solo news conferences since taking office. At the same point in their presidencies, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University in Maryland, Bill Clinton had held 42; George H.W. Bush, 83; Ronald Reagan, 26; Jimmy Carter, 59; Gerald R. Ford, 39; Richard M. Nixon, 29; Lyndon B. Johnson, 88; John F. Kennedy, 65; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, 94.
When reporters asked in mid-September about a chance to question the president about his National Guard records, White House press secretary Scott McClellan replied that Bush "takes questions on a regular basis," adding, "We always take your concerns under consideration."
Mike McCurry, who was Clinton's press secretary and is a senior adviser to Kerry, said Bush was hurt in the first debate because his aides do not appear to recognize the benefits of having reporters "regularly ask the hard questions that are on the mind of the public."
"They have been very effective and disciplined at managing a message and getting through," McCurry said. "Until now, they have not paid any real price in their press coverage. They have mostly been getting out of the news every day what they wanted to."
Bush used to frequently talk to small groups of local reporters as his campaign bus rolled through their state, although such roundtables have tailed off.
For the extraordinary state of Ohio, Bush made an extraordinary effort. On Sept. 1, two executives and a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch were ushered up the front steps of Air Force One - a treatment unheard of for journalists.
The White House suggested the venue after the newspaper asked Bush to meet with its editorial board. The front-page headline that emerged from the 45-minute interview was a quote from the president: "The Country's Getting Better."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Ignorance Isn't Strength
By Paul Krugman
The New York times
Friday 08 October 2004
I first used the word "Orwellian" to describe the Bush team in October 2000. Even then it was obvious that George W. Bush surrounds himself with people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But the full costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled ability to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a party that controls all three branches of government, and face news media that in some cases are partisan supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials aren't telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed in them after 9/11.
This has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called "reality control." In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible, and their policies always succeed. If the facts don't fit that assumption, they just deny the facts.
As a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.
In the last few days we've seen some impressive demonstrations of reality control at work. During the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney insisted that "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." After the release of the Duelfer report, which shows that Saddam's weapons capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, at the time of the invasion, Mr. Cheney declared that the report proved that "delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."
From a political point of view, such exercises in denial have been very successful. For example, the Bush administration has managed to convince many people that its tax cuts, which go primarily to the wealthiest few percent of the population, are populist measures benefiting middle-class families and small businesses. (Under the administration's definition, anyone with "business income" - a group that includes Dick Cheney and George Bush - is a struggling small-business owner.)
The administration has also managed to convince at least some people that its economic record, which includes the worst employment performance in 70 years, is a great success, and that the economy is "strong and getting stronger." (The data to be released today, which are expected to improve the numbers a bit, won't change the basic picture of a dismal four years.)
Officials have even managed to convince many people that they are moving forward on environmental policy. They boast of their "Clear Skies" plan even as the inspector general of the E.P.A. declares that the enforcement of existing air-quality rules has collapsed.
But the political ability of the Bush administration to deny reality - to live in an invented world in which everything is the way officials want it to be - has led to an ongoing disaster in Iraq and looming disaster elsewhere.
How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)
The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe - months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.
Why did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to everyone outside the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn't an effective way of creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day now. Nobody could tell them different.
Why has the pursuit of terrorists been so unsuccessful? It has been obvious for years that John Ashcroft isn't just scary; he's also scarily incompetent. But inside the administration, he's considered the man for the job - and nobody can say different.
The point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance isn't strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he's infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever admitting mistakes, eventually makes mistakes so large that they can't be covered up. And that's what's happening to Mr. Bush.
truthout.org |
