The new Bush Team myth is that the recent spike in the deaths of soldiers in Iraq is just an al-Qaeda campaign endorsing Democrats in the midterm elections. Not only does Bush belittle the tragedy of these soldiers dying, but he dishonors their deaths as mere political propaganda tools used by terrorists to kick the GOP out of DC. This year’s version of the myth originated with Rush Limbaugh and then was echoed by Cheney, Bush, Snow and the military. But the truth is worse than Bush’s fiction: The increased violence in Iraq is related to Bush’s cut-and-run policy in slow motion.
Feeling déjà vu? Just 4 days before the 2004 presidential election, bin Laden released a taped message to the American people that 9/11 was caused by US foreign policy in Arab lands and ridiculed that Bush was focused on a pet goat story rather than defending Americans during a time of battle. Kerry blamed his loss partially to this tape, which he stated had scared the American voters. More importantly, Bush believed that the bin Laden tape helped him “win” the 2004 election:
”I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”
This year’s version of the myth appears to have originated with Rush Limbaugh, who asked Cheney in an October 17th interview about “speculation” by some writer — whose name Rush simply could not remember – that the recent surge in violence in Iraq was motivated by the terrorists’ intent to push American voters to change our government in the midterms:
“Q …I was reading something today that a writer — I don’t remember who — was speculating on increased terrorist attacks in Iraq attempting to demoralize the American people as we get up to the election. And when I read that, it made sense to me. And I interpreted this as that the terrorists are actually involved and want to involve themselves in our electoral process, which must mean they want a change.”
(It should be noted that Think Progress picked up this quote from the UPI, which attributed the quote to Cheney, but the White House transcript and Rush’s transcript attributed the quote to Rush. Since the White House has “cleaned up” transcripts before, I did the unthinkable, and listened to a tape of the interview to confirm it was stated by Rush.)
While Rush pointed the finger at an unknown writer, he could have easily just picked up the ball from Cheney’s comments last summer after Lamont defeated Lieberman in the primary. Cheney then stated that a Lamont victory was a victory for terrorists because it would encourage the “the al-Qaida types” who want to “break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”
In any event, Cheney agreed with Rush that terrorists use pre-election attacks to encourage voting the existing government out of office, citing the Madrid bombing in 2004:
“Sure. Well, I think there’s no question but what this is a sophisticated crew who understand the impact on public opinion. … And so you look at something like our elections here, and I think they’re probably — I don’t have any proof — but I think they’re probably very sensitive to that. We saw what they did in Spain a few years ago. You remember how Aznar had supported us very aggressively, and shortly before the elections in Spain, they launched an attack on trains. They set off several bombs and killed a bunch of people shortly before the election. And they probably did have that impact.”
Notice how Cheney used “probably” 3 times to qualify his statements because he knows that there is no intelligence to support the myth. Moreover, Cheney is making assertions based on unproven assumptions. Cheney is assuming that all terrorists act for the same reasons and therefore whatever motivated the Spain attack is the same motivation for violence and terrorism in occupied Iraq. However, it was not Iraqi insurgents but Spanish or Moroccan terrorists that are charged with the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
Cheney also assumed that the bombings prior to the elections caused the government to be voted out of office because it supported Bush. However, the Spanish election was in a dead heat before the train bombs because the people had already decided to vote out the conservative government that supported Bush’s war contrary to popular opinion.
On Oct. 18th, the ball was passed to Bush, who agreed that the increased violence in Iraq was the terrorists’ propaganda tool to demoralize Americans, noting that “there’s certainly a stepped up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”
So, Cheney and Bush made general comments to link the increased violence in Iraq to our midterm elections. The implication is that Iraqi insurgents are ramping up the violence to affect our midterm elections just as the terrorist bombings in Spain presumably caused voters to vote out the conservative government which supported Bush. The other primary implication is that terrorists wanted Bush-supporting governments out of office because Bush is too tough on terrorists. Therefore, the insurgents in Iraq are increasing their attacks because they want Americans to vote Democrats into office because Democrats are little weaklings on national security.
Thus, the primary message that Bush Team wants to send to voters is buried in the implications. What is needed is some straight talk to tie everything together in a nice package. Enter the military. On Thursday October 19th, after Bush and Cheney confirmed Rush’s theory, General Caldwell in Iraq “attributed the increase in violence at least partly to terrorists who want to influence the American vote.”
Even the UPI reporter noted that our military in Iraq “echoed” those comments made by Cheney 2 days earlier on Rush’s show, which is carried on Armed Force Radio network in Iraq.
So, now we have a General pushing the Rush theory even though the law prohibits the military from using their “official authority or influence to affect the course of outcome of an election.” As the UPI noted:
“Caldwell stopped short of advocating for Republican retention of power, but the implication of his comment — that terrorists in Iraq want to affect the outcome of the U.S. election — makes that suggestion.”
A spokesman for Gen. Caldwell stated that his comments were “not based on intelligence, but rather what Caldwell knows in general about the enemy in Iraq.” This “evidence” to support the myth changed the next day when the Pentagon stated that “Caldwell based his comments on insurgent Web sites which say they need to attack ‘during this period.'”
So, now a general is passing on Rush’s theory from an unknown writer based on the assumption that “this period” from some insurgent website must mean the pre-election period back in the USA. Enter another problem noted by the UPI:
“That period may be interpreted as the run up to U.S. elections, but now is also Ramadan, Islam`s holy month — a time when violence has increased in Iraq in each of the last three years.”
If the Rush theory is correct, why does the increased violence in Iraq now have a correlation to our midterm elections when it has not shown such a relationship in the past 3 1/2 years in Iraq? Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explains the fallacy of the myth’s timing claim of a causal connection between terror attacks and US elections:
“We did not see a spike before the November 2004 (presidential) election. We have not seen big spikes before other major political milestones. Sure, you can see slight increases in violence due to such things, but the big increases are generally due to changed American and Iraqi army tactics. Increased engagements with the enemy lead to greater casualties on all sides.”
A new report by Johns Hopkins University and Brookings explain the fallacy of the myth’s claims of a causal connection between motivations for the Iraqi sectarian violence and US elections:
“The report describes factions motivated as much or more by their own quest for power, the evening of scores on a neighborhood level, and sheer thuggery, than it does a central strategy driven by geopolitics or the American election cycle.”
Now the echo chamber returns back to the White House to add a little “credibility” to Rush’s theory. On October 19th, after the General advocated that voters should retain the GOP in power this November, Press Sec. Snow adopted the General’s statements:
“And as Lieutenant General Caldwell said today in his briefing in Baghdad, it is possible, although we don’t have a clear pathway into the minds of terrorists, it is possible that they are trying to use violence right now as a way of influencing the elections.”
Well, the Rush-Cheney-Bush-Gen. Caldwell-Snow play did not hit a home run, so on October 27th, the Pentagon decided it needed to be more explicit and “attributed the rising violence in Iraq to attempts by al-Qaeda to influence the US elections and stir up opposition to President George W. Bush.”
Another little problem for the myth. When Bush was directly confronted last week about evidence to support this claim, Bush was forced to admit that there is no intelligence to support the myth.
Lacking credible intelligence evidence, and Gen. Caldwell’s “sources” being easily debunked, the Pentagon now cites a Washington Post report which quoted a local al-Qaeda leader as stating that attacks against US soldiers should be increased to “to have a great effect on the American elections.”
The Washington Post report indicates that after Zarqawi was killed, the new al-Qaeda leader called for increased attacks last June as revenge. It appears that then a local terrorist reached by telephone reported his interpretation that the new al-qaeda leader wanted to affect our elections:
After American warplanes killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, his successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, called on followers to concentrate attacks on U.S. troops and Shiite militiamen, soldiers and police. In September, Masri urged every insurgent in Iraq to kill at least one American within 15 days.
The Egyptian-born Masri wanted redoubled attacks “to have a great effect on the American elections,” said Abu Islam al-Arabi, a local al-Qaeda leader reached by telephone Thursday in Anbar province.”
In any event, the Pentagon then builds upon this great little gem from the liberal media (which previously has been deemed unreliable by Bush Team) with a theory:
“It would seem that if they can increase the violence, they can increase opposition to the war and have an influence against the president.”
In short, the increased violence in Iraq – according to the Pentagon – is a “battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.” So, in true ethnocentric tunnel vision, everything that occurs in Iraq is related to what message the terrorists want to send to the American people and has absolutely nothing to do with Iraqis or US occupation of their country.
The truth is that the deaths of American soldiers – while tragic – are but a small part of the overall violence in Iraq and are “dwarfed” by the number of deaths of Iraqi civilians and security forces.
The truth is that there is more violence in Iraq for a number of reasons, including Bush’s failure to provide sufficient ground forces. On October 27th, Maj. Gen. Caldwell now reverses course on his prior claim that the spiked violence was motivated by terrorists wanting to kick the GOP out of DC. Now, Caldwell attributed the spike in US troop deaths to the aggressive, deliberate US operations to “taking back the city of Ramadi, to return it back to Iraqi security forces.”
This is the heart of the matter. The Bush Team push the myth that increased casualty rates are caused by terrorists wanting Democrats in office because it may give the GOP a victory in the midterms, just as Bush believed it did in 2004. But, it also provides cover for what is really happening in Iraq.
The truth is that the soldiers are dying because Bush has quietly established a cut-and-run policy in slow motion. There is a vicious cycle in play. Insurgents are controlling more geographic areas of Iraq because Bush did not send sufficient troops to fight to win the war. As Maj. Gen. Zilmer stated, he has sufficient troops for his main mission of training Iraqi security forces but if his mission changes to winning the fight against the insurgency, then he would need more troops. Thus, soldiers fight and die to push insurgents out of a city, but there are not sufficient troops to maintain control of the city. After the troops leave, the insurgents retake control, and then eventually another battle is fought to regain control of the city from the insurgents. General Caldwell mentioned the never-ending fight in Ramadi, where US forces have battled insurgents on a daily basis since early this year, but have been able to exercise “control only over a few blocks.”
And, it’s not just Ramadi. Terrorists have established al-Qaeda republics in Anbar province, which covers 30% of Iraq’s land mass as well as Diyala province.
That’s the ugly truth. Soldiers are dying from a continuous cycle of battles to retake cities again and again from insurgents’ control because Bush did not provide a sufficient number of ground forces to fight to win the war. The even uglier truth is that Bush is using our soldiers’ death as a political tool to scare American voters into voting for the GOP. So, please, how is that so very different from the myth that terrorists are killing our soldiers as a political tool to force Americans to vote for Democrats?