Send Frank Rich to Congress tomorrow
While there’s no doubt Petraeus will get a bit of drilling before Congress tomorrow, much of it will be subdued by the genteel atmosphere and diplomatic pleasantries normally dispensed in a Senate congressional hearing. Crumpets and tea, General?
Tomorrow, someone in Congress needs to take the gloves off as Frank Rich has done this week, and numerous times in the past.
The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information “war room” conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House “facts” about the surge’s triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we’re being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush’s pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.
As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend’s precisely timed “surprise” presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success “on the ground here in Anbar” (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base.
A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. “This is General Petraeus’s baby,” Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. “Personally, I think it’s a false impression.” Another U.S. officer said that even shops that “sell dust” or merely “intend to sell goods” are included in the Pentagon’s count of the market’s reopened businesses.
….In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq’s population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech announcing the surge.
….No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own data is “pretty well confirmed” by classified intelligence that can’t be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war.
….What’s surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary….Anchoring the “CBS Evening News” from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O’Hanlon. As “a snapshot of what’s going right,” she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against “Al Qaeda.” Channeling the president’s bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq” and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11.
….When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House’s propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit after last weekend’s photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia’s deputy prime minister that “we’re kicking ass.” This war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.
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