Do you, like me, have trouble distinguishing the truth between the various statements administration officials make regarding the status of the war in Iraq, and information published or broadcast elsewhere in the media or on the Web? It makes it difficult to to know if what you’re reading is the truth, or merely a facile canard. Who to believe: Bush and his boyos, or those who dispute the Bush spin on Iraq? Often, many of us are forced to choose sides. Either we join the True Patriots who believe every word that is uttered (for approbation or anonymously) by the Bush administration, or we find ourselves in the camp of the Surrender Monkeys, who think Bush and all his followers have a wee bit of a problem with the virtue of honesty.
The problem, however, may be merely a matter of perspective. What we have here may not be a question of truth or falsehood , but instead more the result of the narrative we choose to construct or accept from the information available to us. How one interprets information is often more critical than the information itself. I know, another French Intellectual argument, but Republicans do seem open to them these days. See, for example, the arguments employed by defenders of the theory of Intelligent Design.
For lack of better labels, I’ve chosen to call the Bush administration narrative “Bush World” and the narrative of all of us surrender monkeys the “Real World.” I know some conservatives might dislike that particular nomenclature for the narrative I happen to espouse, but hey – if you want to play postmodernist games about truth, and conservatives seem all too willing lately to employ this philosophical approach when making (up) their own arguments (cf. Jonah Goldberg) you have to accept that sometimes your opponents may get in first with their own “framing” devices rather than yours.
So with that in mind, let’s examine these two “world narratives” and see if we can get a better understanding of where the differences between them arise in the case of, say . . . Progress in Iraq?
To begin, the usual Bush World view is that we are continually making progress in Iraq despite media reports to the contrary, while the Real World view is that Iraq is a debacle.
In Bush World:
BUSH: There’s a political strategy, and as I said the other day, I said a couple of times, the progress in Iraq is amazing when you think — the political progress. I mean, they’ve gone from tyranny to the election of a transitional national government, to the ratification of a constitution. And they’re about to have elections again. And all this took place in two-and-a-half years. When you compare it to our own history, our road was quite bumpy getting to a constitution. And so the progress is strong.
See what I mean? Bush World people identify progress with political results. Deposed tyrant? Check. Installed pro-American transitional government? Check. Held elections for assembly to draft a constitution? Check. Held election approving Constitution? Check.
Real World people, on the other hand, seem bogged down in problems involving process. In the Real World:
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the election was rigged,” said a U.S. Army officer in Mosul who requested anonymity from Time and who worked on security arrangements for the poll with Iraqi security and election officials. “I don’t even trust our election process.” . . .
More controversial are reports that up to 70 per cent of the voters in Ninawah voted “yes” a tally that some local Sunni Arab politicians say does not correspond with reports that they received on election day. According to the Financial Times, Saleh al-Mutlek, a Sunni politician and prominent opponent of the charter, said that in the provincial capital of Mosul, carloads of Iraqi National Guards had seized ballot boxes from a polling station and transfered them to a governorate office controlled by Kurds. “There is a scheme to alter the results” of the referendum, he claimed. Other Sunnis have claimed members of the main Shia and Kurdish parties in some governorates had filled out blank ballots and stuffed them into boxes after the polls closed resulting in unusually high numbers of voters.
In the constitutional vote huge discrepancies were reported in the Nineveh governorate, whose capital is Mosul. Sources close to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) said that 55% of the voters there voted against the constitution, Abd al-Razaq al-Jiburi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Independent Front said, “I have been informed by an employee of the electoral high commission in Mosul that the voting for the constitution has been ‘no.’” He added, according to reporter Dahr Jamail, that his sources within the IEC said the “no” vote in Nineveh ranged between 75-80%.
Iraq’s Independent Electoral Commission ordered an audit of “unusually high” results in certain governorates, but added that such “anomalies” did not imply fraud or wrongdoing. Early numbers from the Associated Press — which aren’t endorsed by the Electoral Commission — showed almost twice as many “yes” votes for the constitution as the total number of voters in January’s elections for the National Assembly. Late on Monday, the commission said a final vote count, which had been expected by the end of this week, would be delayed a few days in order to “recheck, compare and audit” results. Poll officials said tallies of more than 90 per cent either for or against the document would be subjected to special scrutiny.
Driving doubts are results that do not pass the straight face test. In Ninevah initial reports claimed 75 percent favored the Constitution. This is a majority Sunni Province. Making it less believable were the results in neighboring province, Salaheddin, were 71 percent were voting against the Constitution. The two provinces are similar, both with Sunni Arab majorities.
In some jurisdiction press reports indicate 99 percent support for the Constitution – numbers so astounding that they are reminiscent of the votes in favor of Saddam Hussein in previous Iraqi elections!
So we see the major difference isn’t that the two groups disagree that elections have taken place. What they disagree about is the nature of those elections. Real World people say fraudulent elections are worthless. Bush World people? Hey any election is a good election, right?
Moving on, the Bush World and Real World narratives tend to diverge whenever the discussion comes to the question of the readiness of Iraqi forces to “join the fight.” In Bush World:
The other progress that’s being made is the training of the Iraqi forces. And more and more of the forces are more capable of taking the fight to the enemy.
A pretty clear statement of progress. What could be wrong with it? Well . . . In the Real World:
BAGHDAD — Among the varied armed security men on Baghdad’s streets these days, you can’t miss the police commandos. In combat uniforms, bulletproof vests and wrap-around sunglasses or ski masks, they muscle through Baghdad’s traffic jams in police cars or camouflage-painted pickup trucks, clearing nervous drivers from their path with shouted commands and the occasional gunshot in the air.
The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring.
. . . About 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood of western Baghdad, residents say. “I got a call from my cousins” around the corner, said Ahmed Abu Yusuf, 33, an unemployed Sunni. “They told me to stay hidden because the Volcano were in the streets, arresting Sunnis.”
For three hours, the raiders burst into Sunni homes, handcuffed dozens of men and loaded them into vans. They ended the assault and drove out of the neighborhood just before the dawn call to prayer, which would bring men into the streets, walking to the local mosques, Abu Yusuf said.
Two days later and 90 miles away, residents of the desert town of Badrah, near the Iranian border, found the bodies of 36 of the men in a gully, their hands still bound and their skulls shattered by bullets. Two were the cousins who had phoned him the warning, Abu Yusuf said.
To Bush World folks, training is training. To the Real World? They’re hung up on the nature of that training. They claim that maybe death squads and massacres aren’t the way to go to build a stable Iraq. Again, however, the differences aren’t over the fact that training of Iraqi troops is proceeding. Or is it?
Sometimes there’s just no way to avoid an out and out conflict between the two worlds.
In Bush World:
The U.S.-led coalition continues to make progress in training Iraqi security forces, Rumsfeld said, and he placed their number at 212,000.
Rumsfeld disputed reports that fewer than 1,000 Iraqis were capable of fighting the insurgency without coalition assistance. Calling the lower number “a red herring,” he said it does not reflect the involvement of Iraqis in securing their country.
Unfortunately, the Real World tends to look in a different direction to determine the truth of this matter. In the Real World they tend to rely on reports like this one:
Decline in Iraqi Troops’ Readiness Cited
Generals Tell Lawmakers They Cannot Predict When U.S. Forces Can Withdraw
By Josh White and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 30, 2005; Page A12The number of Iraqi army battalions that can fight insurgents without U.S. and coalition help has dropped from three to one, top U.S. generals told Congress yesterday, adding that the security situation in Iraq is too uncertain to predict large-scale American troop withdrawals anytime soon.
Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said there are fewer Iraqi battalions at “Level 1” readiness than there were a few months ago. Although Casey said the number of troops and overall readiness of Iraqi security forces have steadily increased in recent months, and that there has not been a “step backwards,” both Republican and Democratic senators expressed deep concern that the United States is not making enough progress against a resilient insurgency.
. . . Officials did not say specifically why two battalions are no longer rated at Level 1 and thus unable to operate on their own. They said generally readiness ratings can change for numerous reasons, such as if a commander resigns, or if more training is needed. Casey also said that the “Iraqi armed forces will not have an independent capability for some time.”
You know what I think? The Bush World people needs to have a talking to with General Casey. Clearly he wasn’t reading from the same script as his boss. After all, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, whatever your narrative, it should be, at a minimum, consistent. You’d think Karl Rove “The Architect” Rove would have drummed that into them by now.
