The Road To Hell
The Bush Legacy
The Secret Stuff
The president is quite correct when he says
this is a new day and a new war and it's only
just begun. Making Saddam a key figure if not
the figure, however, is manipulative and
inaccurate, and his daily Reasons, nearly all of
which are beyond independent verification, have
the stink of desperation about them. If you say
enough things enough times, making enough of a
sort of official sound, it begins to sound like
a body of evidence. It begins to sound like you
have a case. But there is no case. At least, not
one that we have real evidence the American
people can look at for themselves. In fact, the
downside risk to Bush's Iraq gambit is so huge,
so unthinkable, that there can only be one
rational reason he's pushing so hard for this:
The Secret Stuff.
The government has done a lot of things in the
name of The Secret Stuff throughout this
nation's existence. When the government is vague
and obfuscatory, when they get backed into the
corner, they wheel out The Secret Stuff. Issues
of national security with devastating
consequences should they be publicly aired.
Bush's hole card is this Secret Stuff, things he
intimates exist but cannot publicly discuss, but
matters of such dire proportions that they are
worth the lives of thousands of teenagers. The
subliminal message, at least the one I'm
receiving, is, Bush is not a madman. He's not
some insane old coot putting kids in harm's way
just to help the mid-term elections. I'm no Bush
fan, but even I can't think of him in that way.
So the message, the one they're not saying but
are clearly communicating with the American
people, is there is Secret Stuff. Something so
terrible, the president feels the urgent need to
act. And we, as good Americans, should trust his
judgment, trust this Secret Stuff, and exercise
a fundamental faith as Bush taps into the
wellspring of exactly that kind of faith he and
his administration has banked away since the
planes hit the towers. President Bush apparently
means to make a withdrawal at the bank of good
will and drain off some of his 70% approval
rating by ramming this war down our throats.
And, honestly, even a cynic like me might be
better able to get on board with this, were it
not for incredibly stupid Deer Freeze gaffes,
nuculer, $150 million for the GOP, and reckless
statements from within Bush's own White House.
To wit, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Karl Rove:
The Rove Propaganda: Insisting on going to war before the inspectors could complete their job.
Nobody Doesn't Like Sarah P.
Terrorism and war are absolutely part of Senior White House
Advisor Karl Rove's reelection strategy. While it is certainly
possible the timing of Rove's incredulous statements and Bush's
saber rattling are coincidental, it nevertheless give me pause
and a reasonable and human suspicion of the administration's
motives, not so much in the objectives of Iraqi disarmament as
in the timing of this campaign for it.
If Bush is trying to sell us on rushing into Iraq, and in
obtaining his own Tonkin Resolution from Congress, he could have
inspired more confidence by beginning his campaign after the
elections. There's plenty of time to bomb Baghdad into the stone
age in 2003, and even now we are unlikely to begin strikes
before the end of the year. But I'm unsure whether or not Bush
is interested in accruing credibility so much as expending it,
draining it from the 70% approval well to achieve both a
military and a political objective at the same time. Tainting
Bush's message— a good and rousing call to arms against the
villainous Saddam— with Beltway politics seems revelatory of a
weasely character of a very small man. Putting the fairest and
best face on this that I possibly can, Bush looks bad. Looks
small and dumb and incompetent and selfish and, well, like a
politician. For the timing if not the substance of all of this.
And he shoots himself in the face, here, by asking us to trust
him without presenting any measurably credible evidence. The
subtext is, “Secret Stuff. Trust Me.” But he asks us to trust
him in the drive time of the 2002 mid-term elections, while Karl
Rove and Andrew Card are running around all but telling us they
are using a potential war with Iraq to maximize the GOP
political position.
I'd also be less nervous about all of this were it not for Vice
President Dick Cheney's direct and indirect profiting from the
Iraqi state.
In this Age of The CEO Perp Walk, changing the tune of the
American press from the economy to national security would seem
a good idea, especially if the media scrutiny was settling in on
the vice president. It is, of course, preposterous to assume the
Iraqi campaign is just Rove wagging the dog (likely at Cheney's
direction), or that the president or vice president or their
administration would actually put anyone in harm's way for
political gain. I am not suggesting this is what they are in
fact doing.
I am also not saying anything about Iraq having the world's
second largest oil reserve. Bush is not saying anything about
it, either, not even if only to dispel the thought that we're
out to grab the oil. This is how evil, how conniving this all
looks. Not talking about the politics or the oil only encourages
that line of cynicism. Even if it is not evil, not conniving,
even if the president and the administration's motives are
absolutely pure, their good takes on the appearance of evil by
the timing of their initiative and their silence on these kinds
of issues. Skepticism is a cancer to any military campaign.
While preparing this country for war, the administration has
done itself and this nation a disservice by encouraging our
cynicism with maneuvers that are either too clever for us to
parse or are exactly what they appear to be: stupid.
This net result of making our forces “strong enough to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up...”
would be to encourage exactly the unorthodox initiatives we
ourselves employed against an unbeatable and unstoppable force—
the British. Desperate people who see no way to wage a
conventional war with us will, by even a child's logic, turn
towards desperate measures— terrorism. Bush's false machismo is
a recipe for, an invitation to, a new era of terrorism
unparalleled in American history.
Bush's statement reads more like a Stalin speech than the leader
of the free world, a monologue from a man seemingly owned by
special interests and manipulated by political strategists like
Karl Rove, who has unequalled access to Bush (not even Cheney
has more access than Rove). This hawkish tone emboldens
terrorists and inflames jihad, as the big enemy flaunts his
bigness. It's really just so insane, just so unthinkable, that I
have to begin to suspect the administration is up to something:
that this Madman Bush tone has a deliberate purpose and design.
Because, if it does not, if this is not some psychological or
propaganda campaign— if Bush actually means this— the
implications are simply terrifying.
I suspect, for me, the proof of which this is will be whether or
not we actually send ground troops into Baghdad. A squeaky clean
air campaign could go on for months with very few American
casualties. Troops in the desert are still a relatively low-risk
endeavor, so maybe we're still talking about under 100 American
casualties [Editor: at this writing, 295 U.S. troops have died
since the Iraq war began in March, including 188 from hostile
fire]. But I'd have to assume that, should the president march
high school boys into Baghdad for close-in hot zone
house-to-house combat, that the president is serious about
Iraq's potential threat to our national security. I'm just not
cynical enough to believe that, should we get to a Panama or
even Vietnam combat mode, that it would be political maneuvering
on Bush's part.
My hope and prayer is we accomplish some semblance of a goal
with an air campaign and some desert maneuvers and then the
administration bows to political pressure from the U.N. and
modifies or withdraws it's military campaign, conveniently,
sometime after the November elections.
The flag-waving chorus of post-911 nationalism has provided Bush
and Rove the perfect atmosphere to run their little hustle,
rushing us headlong into a “war” with Saddam Hussein with a very
sudden urgency that just happens to coincide with the November
elections. And, sadly, we, as a nation, are not calling him on
this. His approval rating remains sky high and House Minority
Leader Dick Gephardt, kicking off his '04 White House run, sold
us all out by cutting a secret deal with Rove & Co. that will
have the Democrats— and I am dizzy with disbelief about this—
voting for Bush's obscene rush to Baghdad [which is why Gephardt
lost my vote]. This president fills me with anxiety about both
his motives and his competence. That no one can see this emperor
is down to his boxer shorts, if not completely naked, fills me
with dread. I desperately fear this man, and I desperately fear
the equally clueless country that supports him.
Forget Iraq, the country in desperate need of regime change is
the USA.
Christopher J. Priest
4 October 2002 Original
3 July 2003 Updated
editor@praisenet.org
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