On IseFire today:
Frank Rich, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has written two important columns in as many weeks–"Someone Tell the President the War is Over" and "The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan."
Neither of them, nor both taken as a whole, will spark an international movement that will change the course of Western Civilization, like October 31, 1517’s Ninty-five Theses affixed to a church door in Wittenburg by Martin Luther; nor will they supplant January 13, 1898’s "J’Accuse" written by Emile Zola as arguably the greatest newspaper article of all time.
But that might say more about the nature of the corruptions and lies operative in the U.S. today than about Rich’s columns themselves. Luther was addressing the Roman Catholic Church’s excesses accreted over centuries. Zola was addressing a complex web of military deceit that leveraged a centuries’-old prejudice, anti-Semitism. The specific corruptions, lies and prejudices Rich tackles in merely 3,000 words are not centuries-old (to be sure, Rich doesn’t tackle some of the agruably lesser operative realities that are centuries old, such as Christian supremacism and, perhaps, Manifest Destiny). And while only some of them are international in scope and most were born here at home, virtually all of them–from Halliburton’s greed and lies to deceitful intelligence "spin" by the Bush administration–have international consequences.
What is more, the number of issues and the complexity of their interaction across both political and cultural plains are as impressive as those at play in the famous words of Luther or Zola:
the blindness of the powerful–the Bush Administration–especially when religion or religious idealism steers the way, which in this case are conservative evangelicalism and neo-conservatism;
going to war under false pretenses–in Iraq based on deliberate manipulation of false connections between 9/11 and Saddam Hussain and erroneous claims as to Iraq’s imminent threat to us;
partisan power based on propaganda and character-assassination–which is the modus operandi of the Republican Party today;
hypocrisy–demonstrated best by the number of war hawk politicians who finagled their way out of military service in Viet Nam or have no children in the military, or both;
corporate greed–Halliburton being its poster child; and,
mismanagement of foreign occupations due to inexcusable naivety and bald arrogance–a situation as old as invasion itself, and among democracies at least as ancient at the disastrous Athenian invasion and attempted occupation of Sicily in 415-413 BC, which eventually but pretty directly led to a period of Spartan conquest over Athens.
These pieces by Rich are "must-reads" and, to coin an ugly term for the digital age: "must-forwards." Highlights are below. The columns themselves are here and here. (Emphases are mine.)
From "Somebody Tell The President The War Is Over."
It was on these false premises – that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America – that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight.
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[Iraq is] a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan.
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To this day it’s our failure to provide [several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq] that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn’t been before 9/11 – "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he’s the one who recklessly created it.
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A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war’s inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now.
From "The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan."
Cindy Sheehan[, the mother of Specialist Casey Sheehan, KIA in Iraq] couldn’t have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president. Aug. 6[, 2005] was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing.
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Character assassination [by the Bush Administration] is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.
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When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke’s character, then we stop talking about the administration’s pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon’s abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson’s wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D.’s.
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America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans’ sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases.
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The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.