[NYTr] Frank Rich: As the Iraqis Stand Down,...We'll Stand Up

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Thanks to Frank Rich for a little pre-9/11 media orgy anti-nauseant.
And thanks to Ed for sending it. - NY Transfer]

sent by Ed Pearl 

The New York Times - Sep 9, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/opinion/09rich.html

As the Iraqis Stand Down... We'll Stand Up

By FRANK RICH

IT will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again
synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an
attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus
instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without
notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is
the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.

That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its
fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse -
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice - were dispatched en masse to the
Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New
York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration
claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear
weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said
Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White
House speechwriter.

What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted
intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide
journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness.
Much of it had been plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret
White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a small task force of administration
brass charged with the Iraq con job.

Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda
offensive that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen.
David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself
in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear
holocaust" has been rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical
scare tactics.

The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the
last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News
producer. White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up
unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded
with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're
being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope.
Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting
for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus
as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly
Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are
paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed
"surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success
"on the ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a
heavily fortified American base.

A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in
those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other
dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post
discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin
village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k
a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. "This is General Petraeus's
baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. "Personally, I think
it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer said that even shops
that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are included in the
Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.

One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky,
a Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's
Green Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his
spiel. "He's spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of
Congress," she told me last week. Though the menu included that native
specialty lobster tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky
said, was a rigid set of talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up,"
"decrease in violence" and "success."

In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a
successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the
American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5
percent of Iraq's population. In truth, the surge had little to do with
this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his
January prime-time speech announcing the surge.

Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former
Saddamists who may have American blood on their hands, the chances of
this "bottom up" model replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population
is almost exclusively Sunni. Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by
the Sunni-Shiite and Shiite-Shiite civil wars that are M.I.A. in White
House talking points.

The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both
General Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of
a 75 percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be
as cooked as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by
WHIG. As The Washington Post reported on Thursday, it excludes
Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government
Accountability Office, which rejected that fuzzy math, found overall
violence unchanged using the methodology practiced by the C.I.A. and
the Defense Intelligence Agency.

No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that
his own data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that
can't be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the
White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information
that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate
W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and
Mohammed ElBaradei before the war. General Petraeus intervened to
soften last month's harsh National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Last
week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in
trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi
government flunking most of its benchmarks.

Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway.
But what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis
stand up, we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the
Iraqi Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in
capacity" three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission
convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired
military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take
charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt
Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget,
either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring success:
"an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." On
that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.

What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that
even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war
its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon
and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New
York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling
civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass
themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the
surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was
largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary.

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic
independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or
in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon
junketeers. Unlike Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist
who clandestinely received big government bucks to "regularly comment"
on No Child Left Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what
you can get free? Two weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The
Washington Post op-ed page, again pushing rosy Iraq scenarios,
including an upbeat prognosis for economic reconstruction, even though
the G.A.O. found that little of the $10 billion earmarked for
reconstruction is likely to be spent.

Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric
seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster
tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she
cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she
repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling
the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that
local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked
America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may
represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency,
according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew
Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's
corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more
trustworthy. Rob Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves
in the Marine Reserve, invited American troops in Iraq to speak
candidly about the Iraqi Parliament's vacation.

When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred,
the White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished.
No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the
economic summit after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly
told Australia's deputy prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This
war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our
troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on,
some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.