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--></style><title>Has he started talking to the
walls?</title></head><body>
<div><tt><font color="#000000">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.</font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000"><br></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000">Mark</font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000">******</font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000">Has He Started Talking to the
Walls?<br>
By Frank Rich<br>
The New York Times<br>
<br>
Sunday 03 December 2006<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."</font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000"><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000"><br>
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.<br>
<br>
Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much
is certain: The dead in Iraq don't give a damn what we call
it.</font></tt><br>
<tt><font color="#000000"></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font color="#000000"> -------</font></tt></div>
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