It Takes a Potemkin
Village
By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed
Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, December 11, 2005
WHEN a government substitutes
propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get
honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once
did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening. What
we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration's
stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and
abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they
increasingly come off as pure Ali G.
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Barry Blit |
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The latest desperate shifts in White
House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in
Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President
Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers
felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."
Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for
Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the
rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the
Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics -- and despite
the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself -- Americans
believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission Accomplished."
The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk,
released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the
president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution
still have larger constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated
nonsense. Its overarching theme -- "We will never accept anything less
than complete victory" -- was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant
reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's
Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American
Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again
inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent
assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" -- a fairy tale
immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's
front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office
of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report
documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that
ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that
the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches
and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves.
What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was the
subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated motive for the
address -- the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National Strategy for
Victory in Iraq" -- was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the
president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings
ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an
unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's inception in
"early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story.
Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at
whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public
view." What turned up was the name of the document's originating author:
Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National
Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion
about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed
as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for
no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin
Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters
that he had never seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last
month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the
same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the
White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the
Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news
articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic
(at a time when American troops in harm's way are desperate for Arabic
translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al
Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we
know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent
since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam's
W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help
disseminate happy talk to his own country's press to further the illusion that
the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic
Iraq") are not without their laughs -- for us, if not for the Iraqis, whose
intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by them.
But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush's speeches.
Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times
revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started
stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen,
Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the
many press queries. We don't have the facts, they say, even as they
maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for various
Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though the
30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from
Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington,
certain facts are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at least
four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and under
phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr.
Bailey "was a founder and active participant in Lead21," a Republican
"fund-raising and networking operation" -- which has since scrubbed his name
from its Web site -- and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a
business address identical to their Washington residence. This curious
tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate
and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have
been lifted from "Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld
and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for "the facts," what we know
so far can safely be filed under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it's
failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as
the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions
made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari
Fleischer's brother), so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang
for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less
known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy
sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had
troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout
America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked.
The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also
unraveled quickly, as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed
outside Falluja on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim
Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the
fallen's loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being
recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does.
Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under
Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that
homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of
her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new
reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And
the president's latest Iraq speeches -- most recently about the "success"
stories of Najaf and Mosul -- still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact
checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released last
week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area where things are going
relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his
rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the
Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer
believing.
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