Ah, yes. Iraq’s Anbar province, where the president made a “surprise” visit yesterday, is indeed a security showcase stocked with “political and economic progress” to boot, just like Mr. Bush said it is.
It’s so secure, I’m thinking of popping in myself – just as soon as I, too, can spare six weeks to plan the pop-in and land at “a heavily fortified home [of] about 10,000 American troops.”
Once on the tarmac, however, I would likely greet my hosts with nervous tics, flinches and suspicious glances, just as Mr. Bush also did. I don’t know if you caught his performance delivered in stark fear and discombobulation, but it most decidedly betrayed his own assuring words.
Yet once inside and surrounded by those 10,000 well-armed troops, Mr. Bush finally put his guard down and the hogwash up. He deployed a crowd-pleasing political end run, announcing that Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker tell him that “if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”
He gave no specifics, of course, nor did he offer any timeline. But one suspects that Iraq’s growing security and the U.S.’ exquisitely planned draw-down will just happen to coincide with the ineluctable troop shortages expected by spring. Miracles do happen.
But the best part of Mr. Bush’s p.r. extravaganza were these three connected lines – a threefold message that summarized what this White House is, and always has been, all about:
“Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media. In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home.”
And there you have it, gift wrapped and nicely bowed: political attack, naked contradiction and laughable propaganda, all in one pithy paragraph.
Antiwar Democrats and apostate Republicans are assaulted as nervous nellies with both eyes on political opportunism. The needless and continuing loss of American lives has nothing to do with their war opposition. The contradiction? Mr. Bush’s ultimate draw down will come, of course, from nothing but fear and failure – failure to have executed the war with any semblance of competence, and fear that someone, somewhere, will tell him he has no choice but to do what he doesn’t want to do, which the Brat-King never, ever countenances.
Naturally with that came the familiar, “They’ll attack us here if we don’t fight them there.” That sophistic chestnut requires no comment, since not a soul alive any longer believes it.
The runner up in the category of p.r. filigree, however, was Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ truly bizarre comment on the substantive nature of a just-concluded meeting between Anbar’s Sunni tribal sheiks and Shiite pols from Baghdad: “There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources,” said Mr. Gates.
Yes, just a little “good-natured jousting,” the lovable cads. What cut-ups, what a frolicking bunch of irrepressible boys.
But it won’t take much getting used to the new-fangled hogwash. Gates was merely previewing more of the same to come – we’ve turned the corner, success is ours, victory is at hand – which sounds a lot like the old-fangled hogwash.
Still, I suspect Gates was in such a jovial mood because he knows it’s pretty much all over; or, rather, will be, come spring. That is likely when the Bush administration finally declares victory by necessity and starts buying tickets home. Yesterday’s p.r. stunt positively screamed that.
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