I honestly can’t even guess about the politics of Congress’s latest votes to reject a withrawal from Iraq, any timetables, and to declare:
“the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war against all who oppose their ideology.”
It’s just depressing to see the press trying to cover the latest psychological operations involving the death of Zarqawi, his almost certainly forged safe house documents, and the announcement of al-Hasri as his successor. The press likely suspects they are being sold a bill of goods, but the farthest they are willing to go is to question the actual strength of the so-called al-Qaeda in Iraq.
We are witnessing a campaign of disinformation on an almost breathless scale. The September 2002 Andy Card roll-out of the White House Iraq Group’s campaign pales in comparison and scope.
I’m becoming a little bit numb to it all. It calls to mind the famous Suskind article:
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
I’m not sure how many people really understood the implications of that statement. It wasn’t arrogance. It was a frank declaration of the length to which the administration is willing to go to create our perception of reality. He wasn’t saying that we are in fact reality-based while they are not. He was saying that they create the reality that we study, and while we’re studying a fake reality, they create another fake reality.
The creation of the myth of African uranium, aluminum tubes, the spiderhole capture of Saddam, the myth of Zarqawi, the emergence of an organization called al-Qaeda in Iraq, the story about Chalabi being a spy for Iran, the safe house documents of al-Zarqawi…all, or many, of these things are a false reality. We study them at face-value at our peril.
Here is what is certain. Iraq’s Sunni population is in a revolt against both the occupation of their country by allied troops and the new Shiite dominated government. There has now erupted a full-on sectarian and tribal war within Iraq that the neither we, nor the Iraqi government, is capable of putting down. Everything else is propaganda, a sideshow, or irrelevent.
And here is the worst part, at least for Americans. We, the people (in our collective opinion), are the real enemy, and their propanganda is aimed at keeping our opinion mixed and muddled enough that we do not demand the withdrawal of our troops. Nothing can dislodge us from Iraq except the will of the American people. So, anything goes to prevent our opinion from turning decisively against the war.
They can create bogeymen, write their memoirs, and kill them off. We’re left scratching our heads, studying their version of reality. We know it doesn’t make sense. We know it doesn’t match the facts. But, what are we to do? They’re the one’s making history. We’re stuck in their reality-based community, chasing our tails.
Looking at the debate in the Congress and the Iraq resolutions, we can see how little it reflects reality. And, yet, we’re sucked right into this false debate, on their terms.
I can’t describe how depressing I find the whole spectacle.
