[Vision2020] Has he started talking to the walls?

[Mark Solomon]

Bush is reminding me of Nixon who circled the White House with DC 
metro buses bumper to bumper three deep so he wouldn't see any of the 
hundred so thousands of Vietnam war protesters outside while he 
watched football on TV.

Mark
******
Has He Started Talking to the Walls?
     By Frank Rich
     The New York Times

     Sunday 03 December 2006

     It turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to 
understand what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be 
consulting instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein 
account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House 
walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has 
ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we've 
witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn't merely in a 
state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It's not 
that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the 
truth is.

     The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is 
primarily responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a 
week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on 
the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely 
disorganized" in Iraq, adding that "I would question at this point 
how effective they are at all at the state level." Military 
intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 
percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of 
NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can't 
even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a 
war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

     But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to 
Iraq's "unity government" though it is not unified and can only 
nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, 
Iraq is not even a nation "in the historic sense.") After that 
pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off 
in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him "the right guy for 
Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The Times's 
revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser, 
Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going 
on" in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of 
running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when 
his boss is impervious to facts.

     In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting 
with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political 
leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada 
al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to 
his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. 
Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that 
we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost all these years. If 
we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, 
we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, 
his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. 
Sadr's existence.

     In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul 
Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for 
only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under 
the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if 
different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, 
the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

     When the president persists in talking about staying until "the 
mission is complete" even though there is no definable military 
mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure 
absurdity. The same goes for his talk of "victory," another concept 
robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to 
prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and 
has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to 
mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the increasing violence 
were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. 
"Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two 
words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

     When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own 
civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it 
was highly instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity 
of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president's 
subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably 
passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be 
termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over "civil 
war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have 
all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from English as 
we once knew it.

     It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and 
the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to 
acknowledge that the "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be 
more accurately called torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar 
intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is 
"pullback," the Iraq Study Group's reported euphemism to stave off 
the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).

     In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television 
anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" 
show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. 
That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too 
accurate a gauge of how much the word "war" itself has been drained 
of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required 
no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what's happening in 
Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

     I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is 
stupid or is the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet 
speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still 
don't. But I have believed he is a cynic - that he could always 
distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold 
us their fictions. That's why, when the president said that 
"absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the midterms, I just 
figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his 
partisan political ends.

     But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more 
isolated from the real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor 
his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is 
not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage 
- watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki - that 
can't be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles 
or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping 
into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the 
rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when 
micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when 
checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the 
Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the 
president at a White House reception for newly elected members of 
Congress. Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, 
"I'd like to get them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much 
as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him 
up.

     Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that 
Iraq was Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those 
jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control 
events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of 
theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more 
theoretical) by the day - special envoy, embedded military advisers, 
partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international 
conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made by a chief 
executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job 
description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's 
decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

     The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes 
himself that he is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting 
democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer 
mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections 
don't register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers 
in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had 
to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing 
course would be accomplished.

     Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the 
chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - 
uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that 
American troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the 
insurgency in al-Anbar." That finding was confirmed in an 
intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being 
tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since 
Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving.

     Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The 
dead in Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.

   -------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061205/f40bd5d6/attachment.html