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Spinning Yarns of 'Good News'
When Kuwait was liberated in 1991 -- a strange concept, Kuwait having been free neither before being invaded by Iraq nor since -- its citizens lined up in the streets of their capital and waved thousands of American flags as troops drove by. "Did you ever stop to wonder," a man called John Rendon proudly asked during a speech to a government agency, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" He answered his own question: "That was one of my jobs then."
The first Bush administration hired Rendon to produce the television show known as the first Gulf War. With the Rendon Group, his public relations firm, Rendon won multimillion dollar contracts to make the American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan look good, and do the same on behalf of the Afghan and Iraqi governments. Propaganda has been a lucrative business in these wars. It gave us such classics as the fabricated toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad early in the war, the taxpayer-supported Pentagon effort to plant positive stories in the Iraqi press, and the more recent miniseries about the successes of the American "surge."
The propaganda controls are clearly in effective hands today. There's been no need, as there is in more discriminating Iraq, to plant positive stories in the domestic press. For the most part the mainstream news media here seem as willing as they were in 2003 to buy the Bush administration's latest recasting of the Iraqi catastrophe as a country on the mend. But caveats grow as lush as date palm in Iraq. Here's this season's crop.
· Al-Qaida was routed. Not exactly. The semimythical invention of "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" was never a force as potent as its Iraqi enemies. One thing Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis agree on is rejection of foreign meddling, be it bin Laden's or Bush's. Iraqis reviled al-Qaida before the invasion and had no connection to Sept. 11. They revile al-Qaida more today, now that Bush's invasion made its brand of terrorism possible on Iraqi soil. Absent American troops, ironically, al-Qaida would have faced an unrestrained assault from Shiite and Sunni militants, to whom tribe comes before religion, and religion before caliphate.
That's just as true in the rest of the Arab world. A Brookings Institution survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year showed bin Laden's popularity never breaking 5 percent. Bin Laden's popularity in the Middle East is itself an invention, convenient to the Bush administration's offensive posture there, inconvenient to Arabs who must pay its price. Bin Laden is the Arab world's Timothy McVeigh, a fringe loon, but one lucky enough to be constantly revalidated by Bush's monomaniacal war on Islamowhatever.
· Refugees are coming back. The return of 25,000 refugees from abroad, out of a total of 2 million, is deceptive. News reports have generally neglected to mention that Syria, where most of Iraq's refugees have gone, shut its door to them two months ago and is now requiring refugees already there to apply for visas -- through the Syrian embassy in Baghdad. In other words, Syria is booting them out.
· Our friends the Sunnis. The Bush administration says the new alliance with former Sunni insurgents is a benefit of the surge's supposed rout of al-Qaida. But those Sunni insurgents had themselves began routing al-Qaida before their alliances with American troops, and well before the "surge" peaked. The Pentagon reversed the chronology to make itself appear as the new strategy's broker -- and to obscure the deeper reason the Bush administration is aligning itself with Sunnis anew. Osama or a free Iraq are not it.
· Our former friends the Shiites. Southern Iraq is already a fiefdom under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite who got rid of most of the British presence and is biding his time before being rid of the American. Sunnis dread a Shiite take-over unrestrained by American occupation. So does Bush, because so do oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, where militant, resentful Islam is the shifty sands under those authoritarian, unelected, lavishly corrupt and American-backed sheikdoms. In Iraq, the Bush administration is rediscovering that a Sunni-dominated authoritarian regime wasn't such a bad thing after all. Lacking that, Sunnis as a proxy force against Shiite hegemony will have to do.
Peace isn't breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It's further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it's confirming once again in Arab eyes that America's end game is control of the Middle East's authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron were an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America's foreign policy as collateral.
Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
© 2007 The Daytona Beach News-Journal Corporation
14 Comments so far
Show AllWE underestimated W, don't you know. No,
THEY overestimated him every inch of the way and even now continue to do so.
Take note students: If you want a successful career in poltics, forget the political science major. Major in drama instead.
Hey, what are you talking about? The war is over. Everyone in Iraq is lining up at their local Starbuck's to read the Arabic version of the Washington Times. So put on a happy face.
And they wonder why any intelligent American doesn't listen to Bush??????? Why he has lost every ounce of credibility he ever had. Most of the above I had already guessed at from his previous actions. It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines just a brain.
We drank the Kool-Aid, we hugged the tar-baby and now we are in Br'er Rabbit's briar patch but we ain't Br'er Rabbit. This time we're going to bleed.
Peace.
The surge was mostly a propaganda ploy for US consumption.
The Bush administration wants to continue funding, backing the expansion of the executive and, last, it wants the US public to buy into the neocon notion that there is a military solution to all social and diplomatic problems, including terrorism.
Of course, the US military focuses on terrorism being something other than what it is: a political weapon.
New Orleans is back in business! The surge-calation was a huge success! Afghanistan is growing more weed than ever! Some dude actually agreed to wed one of the Loonitary Decider's daughters - in spite of the long, twisted history of family mental illnesses!
Freedom's Happ'n!
The surge was entirely a propaganda ploy for US consumption.
When confronted with widespread rejection of his Iraq war policies by the American public, loss of the GOP's control of the legislative branch in the '06 elections, and the Baker-Hamilton group's call for major policy reevaluation, Bush responded by doubling down his bet and escalating the US military presence rather than even hinting that withdrawal was an option on his watch.
In your face. And it worked.
By signaling up front to all the world that the troop strength increase and accompanying counterinsurgency tactic shift plan would take three months to build up, six months to execute, and then three more months to evaluate, Bush bought himself another year to run out the clock. Because everybody knew it was temporary, each of the competing Iraqi militias, political parties, tribes, and sectarian factions (both inside and outside of the Maliki regime) temporarily took some time out to regroup, recruit, and reorganize themselves, in anticipation of the post-surge phase of the insurgency and civil war that would surely follow.
No big surprise then that statistically, the reported violence scaled back. And by simultaneously arming, paying, and legitimizing some selected (formerly hostile) Sunni tribal militias, the Anbar Awakening was ballyhooed as evidence that yes Virginia, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I highly recommend the December issue of Mother Jones, particularly an article by Richard Dreyfuss, for a comprehensive breakdown of what the four major post-American withdrawal scenarios are for Iraq, and how Bush's current policies (including the surge) buy short term benefit at the expense of a worsened long term end result.
From deploring all militias and calling upon them all to disarm, US policy has truly reversed itself a full 180 degrees in the last year, with scarcely a comment in the mainstream press. By aligning with Shiite and Sunni militias alike, look out for the crossfire, or worse.
Bill from Saginaw
Thank you Mr. Tristam for telling it as it is, as so many of us have seen (we who are not in US and many, I see, of those who are) the enormities of deceptions and spins that your government would have the world believe. Especially, the "look, Iraqis are returning!" That one was so obvious as to be unbelievable that any press would print it! Geeez.
And bottle, that would be "misunderestimated" (Bush, the deciderer).
I opposed the first Gulf war because I didn't see any difference between Saddam and the Emir of Kuwait. We put the scumbag back on his throne and have done nothing to promote democracy anywhere - especially here.
"The surge was mostly a propaganda ploy for US consumption."
Actually, they are selling it pretty good here in Denmark, warmed up with a side dish of red cabbage.
How sickening is the fact that our government hires corrupt news sources to produce propaganda in the face of such atrocities.
That's not democractic. Shit, we need our country back.
I just finished a book titled "How to Lie With Statistics". Scary stuff. It amounts to this old adage, "statistics don't lie, but statisticians do."
Anyway, at one point the author pointed out that "accidents" in gathering data do not consistently point in one direction. Therefore, the Bush Administrations so-called "faulty" intelligence amounts to a big ol' pack a lies.
Why doesn't the "liberal" media pick up on this?
Don't forget the latest MSM ploy, "The War is a non-issue to voters." NPR is reporting that Democratic voters seldom if ever mention the war as an issue.
So it goes.