Tomgram: History Ambushes the Bush Administration

[Guest guest]

SharinSharAlike

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:26:17 EDT

Tomgram -- History Ambushes the Bush Administration

 

 

 

 

Tom is much more optimistic than I...mainly because we live amongst a

dumbed-down population who I don't have that much trust in...and I

think if they were to invade Iraq (or another regime change in

Venezuela or even Cuba) Americans would have not really paid that much

attention to what is going on. They don't know the details so they are

still dumbed-down.

 

At least 82% of Americans now realize a building in NY not even hit by

a plane doesn't come down all by itself without explosives being set

in it. But do they know what this is really about? Do they understand

that the men in our govt took our country (with taxpayers' money and

trashing all social programs for people) using our kids -- to a

private war fought just for their benefit. Not about terrorism. Not

about WMD.

 

Do people get that --- that it was a private war waged to get

permanent private control of the oil in the mideast and OPEC? Using

the country and armies and money for their own personal exploits?

 

Just that there are still so many people that give bush any positive

rating at all on fighting terror, as though that was what any of this

was about, is unsettling. Those people are not getting it.

 

Sharin

 

 

 

 

Tomgram: History Ambushes the Bush Administration

 

[Note for readers: This is the stand-alone conclusion to a two-part

dispatch, the first of which, Exporting Ruins, was published two weeks

ago.]

 

In the Rubble

By Tom Engelhardt

 

You can count on one thing. All over Washington, Republicans are at

least as capable as I am of watching and interpreting the polling

version of the smash-up of the Bush administration. With each new

poll, the numbers creep lower yet. Presidential approval in the latest

Washington Post-ABC News poll dropped another 3% in the last month and

now sits at 38%, while disapproval of the President continues to

strengthen -- 47% of Americans now " strongly disapprove " of the

President's handling of the presidency, only 20% " strongly approve. "

(62%, by the way, disapprove of the President's handling of the war in

Iraq.)

 

Behind these figures lurk worse ones. When asked, for instance,

whether they would vote for a generic Democrat or Republican in the

upcoming midterm elections, those polled chose the generic Democrat by

a startling 55-40%, the largest such gap yet. In addition, Democrats

have now become the default party Americans " trust " almost across the

board on issues, even in this poll edging the Republicans out by a

single percentage point on the handling of terrorism.

 

Commenting on a recent Ipsos-AP poll showing Democrats and Republicans

in a tie on the question, " Who do you trust to do a better job of

protecting the country, " GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio said: " These

numbers are scary. We've lost every advantage we've ever had. The good

news is Democrats don't have much of a plan. The bad news is they may

not need one. " Surprisingly, despite the way Democrats have shied off

the subject, a near-majority (45%) of those polled were also in favor

of some kind of Feingold-like censure of the President for listening

in on citizens without prior court approval.

 

The words connected to almost any new poll these days are " hit a new

low. " Other recent new lows were reached by that AP-Ipsos poll and by

a Fox News poll where presidential approval was at 36%. Or take a

recent state poll in California, where Bush has admittedly never been

a popular figure. Still, a 32% approval rating? Or check out the

trajectory of Bush polling approval numbers from September 11, 2001 to

today. Despite various bumps and plateaus -- including a conveniently

engineered, Karl Rovian bump just before election 2004 -- it's been a

slow, ever-downward path that, in early 2005, dipped decisively under

50%; by the end of 2004 had crossed the 40% threshold; and is, at

present, in the mid-! 30% range.

 

There's no reason to believe that the bottom has been reached. After

all, these polls precede the recent disastrous flap over the Patrick

Fitzgerald federal court filing on I. Lewis Libby and the various

" declassification " admissions of the President and Vice-President (of

which there is guaranteed to be more to come); these figures arrived

before the (retired) generals revolt against Donald Rumsfeld, which is

still spreading and to which the President's staunch defense can only

contribute fuel ( " Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership

is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full

support and deepest appreciation. " ); these figures precede by a couple

of months the beginning of the next hurricane season along the never!

-reconstructed Gulf Coast; they precede any indictment of Karl Rove or

of other Bush administration figures in the Plame case, and further

even more contorted presidential (and vice- presidential) fall-back

positions in the same case; these polls come before the predictable

happens in Iraq and the sectarian war there worsens while the American

position weakens as well as before the Iranian situation really kicks

in; they arrive before summer gas prices head above $3 a gallon aiming

for the stratosphere; before any real economic bad news comes down the

pike; before other as yet unknown crises hit that the Bush

administration predictably just won't be able to get its collective

head or its waning governmental powers around.

 

This is the situation before some future round of hideous polling

figures sets off a full-scale panic in the Republican Party, leading

possibly to a spreading revolt of the pols that could put the present

revolt of the generals in the shade. Given the last couple of years,

and what we now know about the Bush administration's inability to

operate within the " reality-based community " (as opposed to spinning

it to death), there is no reason to believe that a polling bottom

exists for this President, not even perhaps the Nixonian Age of

Watergate nadir in the lower 20% range.

 

Toppling the Colossus of Washington

 

A revolt of the Republican pols, should it occur, would highlight the

essential contradiction between the two halves of the Bush

administration's long-term program, until recently imagined as

indissolubly joined at the hip.

 

Domestically, there was the DeLay-style implanting of the Republican

Party (and the ready cash infusions from lobbyists that were to fuel

it) at the heart of the American political system for at least a

Rooseveltian generation, if not forever and a day. This country was to

be transformed into a one-party Republican democracy, itself embedded

in the confines of a Homeland Security State.

 

Abroad, there was the neocon vision of a pacified planet whose oil

heartlands would be nailed down militarily in an updated version of a

Pax Romana until hell froze over (or the supplies ran out). If in 2002

or 2003, these seemed like two perfectly fitted sides of a single

vision of dominance, it is now apparent that they were essentially

always at odds with each other. Both now seem at the edge of collapse.

 

The dismantling of the domestic half of the Bush program is embodied

in the tale of Tom DeLay. Not so long ago, " the Hammer " ( " If you want

to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules... " ) was a

Washington colossus in the process of creating a Republican political

machine built in part " outside government, among Washington's

thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of

thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in

political money at their disposal. "

 

With his K Street Project, he had transformed the generally

" bipartisan " nature of money- and influence-peddling in Washington

into a largely Republican funding machine. Meanwhile, with the

gerrymandering scheme he rammed through the Texas legislature, which

chased local Democrats all the way to Oklahoma and back, and added six

seats to the Republican House majority in 2004, he seemed to be

setting the course of the ship of state for the foreseeable future.

 

Astride the political world, DeLay then looked invulnerable, while the

well-hammered Democrats seemed consigned to the status of a minority

party for decades to come. Who could have imagined that, less than two

years later, DeLay would be indicted for money-laundering in Texas

and, faced with the unraveling Abramoff case, resign his House

leadership position, then withdraw from the reelection campaign for

his House seat, and finally, with his top staff aides going down, find

himself possibly on the verge of indictment in Washington?

 

Delay's project was meant for life, not for a life sentence. And if

you're honest with yourself, a couple of years back I'll bet you

didn't expect anything like this either. You can certainly bet that,

when they created those fabulous fictions about Iraq and then invaded,

it never crossed the minds of George, Dick, Don, Condi, Paul, Stephen

and the rest that anything like this might ever happen -- not just to

DeLay or to the Republican Party, but to them. Think of it this way:

They were never putting forward the " unitary executive theory " of

government and launching a commander-in-chief state in order to turn

it all over to a bunch of Democrats, no less the thoroughly loathed

Hillary Clinton.

 

How time flies and how, to quote Donald Rumsfeld's infamous phrase

about looters in Baghdad, " stuff happens. " Looked at in the light of

history, the incipient collapse of the Bush project seems to have

occurred in hardly a blink. Its brevity is, in a sense, nearly

inexplicable, as unexpected as water running uphill or an alien

visitation. We are, after all, talking about the ruling officials of

the globe's only " hyperpower " who have faced next to no opposition at

home.

 

In these years, the Democratic Party proved itself hardly a party at

all, no less an oppositional one, and the active antiwar movement,

gigantic before the invasion of Iraq, has remained, at best,

modest-sized ever since. At the same time, in Iraq the administration

faced not a unified national liberation movement backed by a

superpower as in Vietnam, but a ragtag, if fierce, Sunni resistance

and recalcitrant Shiite semi-allies, all now at each other's throats.

 

What makes the last few years so strange is that this administration

has essentially been losing its campaigns, at home and abroad, to

nobody. What comes to mind is the famous phrase of cartoonist Walt

Kelly's character, Pogo: " We have met the enemy and he is us. " Perhaps

it's simply the case that -- in Rumsfeldian terms -- it's hard for

people with the mentality of looters to create a permanent edifice,

even when they set their minds to it.

 

And yet, it wasn't so long ago that every step the Bush people took on

either " front " came up dazzling code orange, brilliantly staving off

rising political problems. As a result, it took just short of five

miserable years, which seemed a lifetime, to reach this moment --

years which, historically, added up to no time at all. Is there

another example of the rulers of a dominant global power -- who

fancied themselves the leaders of a New Rome -- crashing and burning

quite so quickly? In less than five years, Bush and his top officials

ran their project into the ground. In the process, they took a great

imperial power over a cliff and down the falls, without safety vests,

rubber dinghies, or anyone at the bottom to fish us all out.

 

This process, though hardly noticed at the time, began early indeed --

and at its corrosive heart was, of course, Iraq. How can you explain

the way the leaders of the world's preeminent military power were

chased through the night by Iraq's unexpected set of rebellions and

its no-name resistance? How quickly -- though, unfortunately, not

quickly enough -- their various elaborate tales and lies, their

manipulated intelligence and cherry-picked stories of Iraqi WMD and

Saddam's nefarious links to al-Qaeda were dismantled -- a process that

has yet to end. Only last week, another little tale of fraud was done

away with by the Washington Post. (this one is about Al-Zarqawi

propaganda planted by government disinformation and misinformation

psyops, given to a compliant NY Times reporter by the name of Dexler

who dutifully reported the propaganda...and a reporter at the

Washington Post got to the bottom of it and told us last week that it

was all bogus)

 

On May 29, 2003, in a television interview, the President described

two mobile trailers found in Iraq by U.S. and Kurdish soldiers as

" biological laboratories " and said: " We have found the weapons of mass

destruction. " This claim would be cited by senior administration

officials for months thereafter and yet, on May 27, a

" Pentagon-appointed team of technical experts had strongly rejected

the weapons claim in a field report sent to the Defense Intelligence

Agency, " as would other reports to come.

 

History's Surprises

 

Most Americans are now aware that the administration's various pre-war

tales have evaporated, including presidential howlers like the

possibility that Saddam would place (nonexistent) unmanned aerial

vehicles off our East coast (in some unexplained fashion) to spray

(nonexistent) chemical and biological weaponry over Eastern cities.

(Maybe this was just some sort of displaced Sunbelt wish-fulfillment

fantasy.)

 

We think less, however, about the way another set of tales -- heroic

yarns of battlefield derring-do and American-style shock-and-awe

triumph -- dissolved almost as they were created. Just two weeks short

of May 1st, it seems appropriate to glance back at a moment I'm sure

no one has quite forgotten, though the Bush administration would

undoubtedly prefer that we had. I'm thinking of May 1, 2003, which

David Swanson of the After Downing Street website recently labeled M

(for Mission Accomplished) Day, a holiday that, he points out, lasted

not even a single year.

 

Let's return, then, to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, an

aircraft carrier whose planes had released over a third of the three

million pounds of ordnance that had just hit Iraq. It had almost

reached its homeport, San Diego, the previous day, but was held about

30 miles out in the Pacific because the President, as New York Times

columnist Maureen Dowd would point out, chose to co-pilot an S-3B

Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet onto its deck rather than far less

dramatically climb stairs.

 

That day certainly seemed like the ultimate triumphalist political

photo op as well as the launching pad for George Bush's 2004

reelection campaign. British journalist Matthew Engel referred to the

President then as " the stuntman in the bomber jacket. " It was actually

a flight suit, but the phrase caught something of the moment. The Tom

Cruise film Top Gun -- made, by the way, with copious help from the

U.S. Navy -- was on everyone's mind in what Elizabeth Bumiller of the

Times called " one of the most audacious moments of presidential

theater in American history. " It seemed to confirm that George Bush

was a more skilled actor-president than Ronald Reagan had ever been.

 

Unlike his father, the younger Bush was visibly comfortable in the

business of creating fabulous fiction. We know that Scott Sforza, a

former ABC producer, " embedded " himself on that carrier days before

the President hit the deck. Along with Bob DeServi, a former NBC

cameraman and lighting specialist, and Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News

television producer, he planned out every detail of the President's

landing, as Bumiller put it, " even down to the members of the Lincoln

crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right

shoulder and the ‘Mission Accomplished' banner placed to perfectly

capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot.

The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call ‘magic

hour light,' which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush. "

 

So, on that thrilling day, the President landed on what was

essentially a movie set. After carefully taking off his helmet in

private †" no goofy Michael Dukakis moments here -- he made a Top Gun

victory speech, avoiding Vietnam as politicians had largely done for

two decades. The speech had World War II on the brain right down to

the cribs from Churchill. ( " We do not know the day of final victory,

but we have seen the turning of the tide… " ) The President cited " the

character of our military through history -- the daring of Normandy,

the fierce courage of Iwo Jima… " Given his frame of reference, he

probably meant from The Sands of Iwo Jima to Saving Private Ryan. Then

he spoke of " the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies

[and] is fully present in this generation. "

 

He also delivered his now-infamous almost-victory line against the

background of that Mission Accomplished banner, claiming that " major

combat operations in Iraq have ended. "

 

Give George Bush credit: When it came to not-quite-battle footage, he

proved he could don a military uniform, get in a military vehicle, and

carry it off with panache. His on-deck Tom Cruise " swagger " would be a

staple of press coverage for weeks. And above all, he clearly loved

landing on that deck, wearing that outfit, making that speech. He was

having the time of his life.

 

But even as his advance men were bringing it off, even as he was

glorying in his color-coded tale of battle triumph, something was

beginning to devour that moment of presidential glory. A headline that

went with the CNN account of his landing that day caught this well:

" Bush calls end to 'major combat,' " it said, but there was also a

subhead, little noted at the time: " U.S. Central Command: Seven

[American soldiers] hurt in Fallujah grenade attack. " Those two

headlines would struggle for dominance for the next couple of years, a

struggle now long over.

 

Let's consider the odd fate of the perfect fiction Bush's men put

together on the Abraham Lincoln, because it was typical of what has

happened to administration image-making and story-telling. Only six

months later, Time magazine was already writing, " The perfect photo-op

has flopped, " and claiming that, shades of Vietnam, the President had

a " growing credibility problem. " By then, instead of preparing for a

series of Top-Gun reelection ads, the President and his advance men

were busy bobbing and weaving when it came to that fateful " Mission

Accomplished " banner. By then, those Iraqi grenades had multiplied

into a Sunni insurrection and Fallujah had morphed into a resistant

enemy city that, in November 2004, would be largely destroyed by

American firepower without ever being fully subdued; and the President

was already pinning the idea for creating that banner on the sailors

and airmen of the Abraham Lincoln; only to have the White House

finally admit that it had produced the banner -- supposedly at the

request of those same sailors and airmen; and then, well … not. Long

before May 1 rolled around again, " mission accomplished " would be a

scarlet phrase of shame -- useful only to Bush critics and despised

Democrats.

 

By July 2003, as we now all know, top Bush officials were in a panic,

already sensing that the other part of their victory story -- their

far-fetched set of explanations for why we had to invade Iraq -- was

being gnawed away at. That was why, when Joseph Wilson, who had

emerged as a potentially dangerous administration critic, published

his famed op-ed on Niger uranium in the New York Times that July 6th,

the administration gathered its forces to whack him and his wife, and

so offer a warning to others -- with all the disastrous consequences

for Bush and his key officials with which we now live.

 

By November 2003, George Bush's presidency was already beginning to be

eaten alive by a growing, if chaotic, Iraqi rebellion; while the movie

version of Bush's War was already guaranteed never to make it into

DVD. All its mini-tales -- of the Jessica Lynch rescue, the tearing

down of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, Pat Tillman's last stand in

Afghanistan -- would, like those missing weapons of mass destruction,

like the American occupation of Iraq itself, crash and burn. In most

cases, this happened almost as the stories were being created.

 

Take Private Lynch, who was " rescued " by American Special Forces

arriving at the hospital where she was being treated by Iraqi doctors

armed with night-vision cameras and a flag to drape over her. They

shot their film of the rescue, and transmitted it in real time to

Centcom headquarters in Doha, where it was edited and released. The

result was a dreamy media frenzy of patriotism back home, complete

with a wave of Jessica T-shirts and other paraphernalia and an NBC

movie of the week. And yet Jessica Lynch's story, like the story of

that toppled statue in Baghdad, like the story of Saddam's vast

arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, was soon in tatters. An

unheroic version that lacked gun or knife wounds, mistreatment, or

even Iraqi captors from which to be rescued, practically galloped onto

the scene. By the time Lynch herself more or less rejected the story

told about her in a book, I Am a Soldier, Too, it was too late. It

almost immediately hit not the bestseller lists but the remainder

tables because her story had already evaporated.

 

Americans, of course, like victory. We prefer to be in a triumphalist

culture and undoubtedly much of the turn of events of the last couple

of years -- including the recent revolt of the generals along with

those sagging presidential polling figures and the multiplying

conversion experiences of all sorts of conservatives and even former

neocons -- can simply be accounted for by the resulting not-victory in

Iraq.

 

Undoubtedly, the Bush administration is not yet out of ammunition,

either figuratively or literally. Even as they stand in the rubble of

their world, top Bush officials remain quite capable of making

decisions that will export ruins to, say, Iran and create further

chaos in the oil heartlands of the planet as well as here at home. I

don't sell them short, nor do I see a Democratic Party capable of

taking the reins of the globe's last standing imperial power and doing

a heck of a lot better. Still, there's something consoling in knowing

that history remains filled with surprises and that the short,

rubble-filled, disastrous career of the Bush administration looks

likely to be one of them.

 

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ( " a

regular antidote to the mainstream media " ), is the co-founder of the

American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture,

a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The

Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

 

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt