The surge is coming up for assessment in a month. Ever thought to run through the numbers of times the Bush administration has misused information to get what it wants? How often, say, has the AG thrown red meat to the media to keep their wandering eyes from what's really going on?
Mariane Pearl was called by Alberto Gonzales with some good news in March: the Justice Department was releasing a transcript in which the long-incarcerated Qaeda thug Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the beheading of her husband. But there was something off about Mr. Gonzales’s news. It was almost four years old. ...Ms. Pearl recognized a publicity ploy when she saw it. And this one wasn’t subtle.
What was going on?
Mr. Gonzales released the Mohammed transcript just as the latest Justice Department scandal was catching fire, with newly disclosed e-mail exchanges revealing the extent of White House collaboration in the United States attorney firings.
Though he failed that time -- the attorney firings became and continue to be big news -- Mr. Gonzales’s P.R. manipulation of the war on terror hasn’t always been so fruitless. To upstage increasingly contentious Congressional restlessness about Iraq in 2006, he put on a widely viewed show to announce an alleged plot by men in Miami to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and conduct a “full ground war.” He said at the time the men “swore allegiance to Al Qaeda” but, funnily enough, last week this case was conspicuously missing from a long new White House “fact sheet” listing all the terrorist plots it had foiled.
And not just AG Gonzales. John Ashcroft did his share of political dirty work, announcing a bomb threat to the Sears Tower just before the Democratic convention, and the arrest of "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla to drown out the noise from Colleen Rowley's revelations. Neither "scare" turned out to be any truer than the most recent scare thrown at Congress to add pressure to passage of the expansion of presidential domestic surveillance powers. The "dirty bombers" turned out to be members of the Bush administration, filling the air with lies.
That's just the background. The White House is once again ramping up the lies. "Public relations strategies for the war, far from waning, are again gathering steam, to America’s peril," Frank Rich warns in an opinion piece full of reminders that the White House tends to get what it wants by using lies and diversions.
What's the urgency? The assessment of the "surge" in Iraq is coming in a month. This time the administration is up against a challenge to its fictions: the emergence of information that "expose[s] the fictional new story line... concocted to rebrand and resell the Iraq war as a battle against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda — or, as Mr. Bush now puts it, 'the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.'" That fiction is based on the administration's story line about the emergence of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" which was allegedly behind the bombing of the Samarra mosque and the onset of what is truly a civil war in Iraq.
No one has taken credit for the mosque bombing to this day. But Iraqi government officials fingered Badri as the culprit. (Some local officials told The Washington Post after the bombing that Iraqi security forces were themselves responsible.) Since Badri is a leader of a tiny insurgent cell reportedly affiliated with what the president calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Bush had the last synthetic piece he needed to complete his newest work of fiction: 1) All was hunky-dory with his plan for victory until the mosque was bombed. 2) “Al Qaeda in Iraq” bombed the mosque. 3) Ipso facto, America must escalate the war to defeat “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” those “very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”
Oops. Now, it seems "Al Qaeda in Iraq" didn't do the job. "Far from having any connection to bin Laden’s Qaeda, the Samarra bombing was instead another manifestation of the Iraqi civil war that Mr. Bush denies." Truth of the matter? "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just another White House concoction to keep us -- and Congress -- from a well--informed assessment of the surge.
While PR manipulation and fiction rules the White House, reality remains out there, in charge of our future.
And so the president, firm in his resolve against “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” heads toward another August break in Crawford while Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains determined to strike in America. No one can doubt Mr. Bush’s triumph in the P.R. war: There are more American troops than ever mired in Iraq, sent there by a fresh round of White House fictions. And the real war? The enemy that did attack us six years ago, sad to say, is likely to persist in its nasty habit of operating in the reality-based world that our president disdains.
Of course, it's a major embarrassment to be the administration which invaded the wrong country, but there it is.
The greatest enemy which struck us six years ago is proving to be considerably more dangerous to the future of America than Al Qaeda. That enemy is the Bush administration itself.
During those years, the administration has had plenty of assistance from Frank Rich's employer, the New York Times. Most recently Times reporters on the ground in Iraq (and their editors at home) have been notable for giving weight to the White House's claim that a small group of foreign supporters of Iraqi insurgents are "Al Qaeda in Iraq."
When they are challenged by small-fry like Prairie Weather (a long-time NYT subscriber, emailing the Baghdad bureau, getting a response), the most they will do is change the wording ever so slightly in the next edition of the paper to give themselves an appearance of distance from White House fictions.
That's not good enough. We need more than Frank Rich's columns. For the internet reader of the paper who's not a subscriber, Rich's work is stashed away in the "select" section of the New York Times, out of reach except for those willing to pay a fee.
National newspapers (sinking ever lower in Americans' opinions, according to Pew Research) should expose Bush's PR moves on the day they happen, at a time the information could be used to, well, stop a war -- or at the very least stop lies before they become the currency of our political life. That way we could stop the real "dirty bombers" before they get to the target.
