[NYTr] Bush's War Without End (Parry on Bush Speech)

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Sep 14, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/091407.html

Bush's War Without End

By Robert Parry

Let it be noted that the morning after George W. Bush announced an
open-ended – possibly permanent – military occupation of Iraq the
premier U.S. newspapers ran headlines about the President ordering
“troop cuts,” itself a troubling reminder of how the American people
got into this mess.

The New York Times’ lead headline read: “Bush Says Success Allows
Gradual Troop Cuts.” The Washington Post went with: “Bush Tells Nation
He Will Begin to Roll Back ‘Surge.’”

In a subhead, the Post highlighted a tidbit from its own interview with
Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq: that he projected
“sustainable security” in that country by mid-2009 (which would fall
shortly after the sixth anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”
speech).

Granted, the news stories did include some reasons for skepticism about
Bush’s latest happy talk, including references to the assassination of
the U.S.-allied Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha earlier in the day in
Anbar Province and the apparent collapse of Iraqi negotiations over how
to divvy up the country’s oil revenues.

Yet, despite Bush’s long history of wishful thinking – or delusions –
about Iraq, the major newspapers still gave Bush the headlines he
wanted.

So, Americans bustling past newsstands on their way to work would get
the superficial impression that Bush was finally moving toward the Iraq
exit door when he really was doing all he could to paint the country,
and his presidential successor, into a corner.

While the newspapers played up Bush’s relatively modest troop cuts –
5,700 by year’s end and another 20,000 or so by July 2008 – the more
significant point was that the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq
would still exceed the 130,000 or so who were in Iraq last November
when anti-war sentiment led to the defeat of Republicans in Congress.

In his televised address, Bush also made clear that he foresaw an
indefinite U.S. military commitment to Iraq reaching “beyond my
presidency,” with any possible future de-escalation tied to Bush’s new
slogan, “return on success.”

So, the headlines after the Sept. 13 speech could have read: “Bush Vows
Indefinite U.S. Military Occupation of Iraq.” Indeed, if Bush’s speech
is remembered historically, it will almost surely be for that reason,
the clearest indication yet of his imperial impulse in the Middle East.

But the major U.S. news outlets still fear diverging from the message
that Bush and his right-wing allies want delivered to the American
people.

More Propaganda

That was the case in 2002-03 when the same newspapers trumpeted Bush’s
Iraq-WMD propaganda and in early 2005 when Bush’s “freedom agenda” was
conveyed with almost no skepticism, even as Bush was eliminating the
classic American principle of inalienable rights, including the habeas
corpus guarantee against arbitrary imprisonment, protection against
“cruel and unusual punishment, “ and prohibitions against unreasonable
searches.

The news media’s timidity and/or complicity in relation to Bush and his
“war on terror” policies remain a fact of life today.

When the President asserts that up is down, readers of American
newspapers have to search somewhere in the jump for a carefully hedged
suggestion that perhaps up is really sideways. After six years of this
behavior, it’s clear that the U.S. press corps has proven no match for
Bush’s cognitive dissonance.

By focusing on “troop cuts” after Bush’s endless-war speech, the
newspaper headlines represent just the latest example of why large
segments of the American people have lost confidence in the U.S. news
media.

The public intuitively understands that national-level journalists are
looking out for their careers first, way more than the public’s right
to know. With a few exceptions, these well-paid media stars fear that
their livelihoods would be endangered if they got on the wrong side of
the administration and its brass-knuckled allies.

So the beat goes on. By jacking up the number of troops and then
letting some go home, Bush gets to play an escalation of the war into a
troop cut. He also gets to sell the Iraq War again as a battle
necessary to thwart al-Qaeda terrorists, even though U.S. intelligence
has long ago concluded that Bush’s strategy is playing into al-Qaeda’s
hands.

Almost one year ago, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center posted a
captured al-Qaeda communiqué from a senior aide to Osama bin Laden, a
Libyan identified as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, to the now-deceased
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which stated in
black-and-white al-Qaeda’s view of the Iraq War.

“Prolonging the war is in our interest,” the al-Qaeda letter read. Yet,
neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has ever mentioned
this remarkable fact. Nor have Democrats cited the “Atiyah” comment as
a counterpoint to Bush’s claims that al-Qaeda wants to “drive us out”
of Iraq.

The reality – as many U.S. intelligence analysts know – is that
al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan see their personal survival and their
movement's growth tied to the tying down of American forces in Iraq and
to the outrage that an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq continues to
stir up in the Islamic world.

[To view the “prolonging the war” excerpt in a translation published by
the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the
entire letter, click here. ]

Meanwhile, President Bush keeps pointing the way forward in Iraq from
one mirage to another, as the United States staggers deeper into a
neoconservative dreamscape of delusions.


[For more on how this political crisis came to pass and what it means
for the future of the American Republic, see our new book, Neck Deep:
The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.]