Maureen Dowd: With his eyes shut, Bush sees an improving Iraq
By Maureen Dowd (NYT)
Friday, October 31, 2003
(International Herald Tribune)
WASHINGTON: Maureen Dowd In the thick of the war with Iraq, President
George W. Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information
minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism.
"He's my man," Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining
contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, also known as "Comical Ali" and
"Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as U.S. tanks rumbled in, "There
are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and
we will win the war. This is for sure."
Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.
Speaking to reporters this week, Bush made the bizarre argument that the
worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on
the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.
In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost
hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was
necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."
The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used
to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a
quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam Hussein and
the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our
economy).
Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who
get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more
dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in
Iraq, the less we need to send more troops.
The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and weapons of mass destruction, the
less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated
the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.
In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from Tikrit, Major General
Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush
officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even
understand the political utility of truth.
After admitting recently that Saddam had no connection to the Sept. 11
attacks, the president pounded his finger on his lectern on Tuesday, while
vowing to stay in Iraq, and said, "We must never forget the lessons of Sept. 11."
Bush looked buck-passy when he denied that the White House, which throws
up PowerPoint slogans behind his head on television, was behind the "Mission
Accomplished" banner. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld looked
duplicitous when he acknowledged in a private memo, after brusquely upbeat
public briefings, that America was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is
wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles turned Iraq into a hideous
tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrived there to showcase successes.
But the fear of young American soldiers who don't speak the language or
understand the culture, who don't know who's going to shoot at them, was
captured in a front-page picture in Wednesday's New York Times: two soldiers
leaning down to search the pockets of one small Iraqi boy.
Bush, staring at the campaign hourglass, has ordered that the "Iraqification" of
security be speeded up, so Iraqi cannon fodder can replace American sitting
ducks. But Iraqification won't work any better than Vietnamization unless the
Bush crowd stops spinning.
Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Bright Shining Lie," recalls
Robert McNamara making Wolfowitz-like trips to Vietnam, spotlighting good
news, yearning to pretend insecure areas were secure.
"McNamara was in a jeep in the Mekong Delta with an old Army colonel from
Texas named Dan Porter," Sheehan told me. "Porter told him, 'Mr. Secretary,
we've got serious problems here that you're not getting. You ought to know what
they are.' And McNamara replied: 'I don't want to hear about your problems. I
want to hear about your progress.'"
"If you want to be hoodwinked," Sheehan concludes, "it's easy."
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com |
