<i>Other Music from a...</i> Different Kitchen

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

9/11 is not a campaign slogan....

Photo courtesy: The Sydney Morning Herald.

Despite recent news events, Bush has not only opened up a sizeable lead in current polls against Kerry but is inexplicably, and despite probably the most inept execution of American foreign policy since the Vietnam War, also beating Kerry 53% to 41% on the question of who would handle the situation in Iraq better and by a whopping 57% to 36% on the question of who would handle the war on terrorism better. (Time)

This is due in large part to the GOP's continued efforts to tie 9/11 and Saddam Hussein together as a jusification for this travesty of a war, even though this theory has been long-discredited. Bush's endless exploitation of 9/11 in general, despite his promise not to politicize this terrible tragedy, has no doubt also helped.

The recent RNC was just one instance of these campaign strategies at work:

The organizers of this year's Republican National Convention engaged in some very shrewd rewriting of history. If you watched carefully, you noticed a narrative of the war on terrorism in which most of the past two years disappeared.

Viewers got enormous detail on the bravery displayed by Americans after the attacks of Sept. 11. But [no discussion of] how so many of its assumptions went haywire or why our strategy was so flawed that we have now conceded large parts of the Sunni Triangle to our enemies. There were no reminders of "Mission Accomplished" or "bring 'em on."

Of course the Bush team wants voters to shield their eyes from the specifics of its record in Iraq. Otherwise, Americans just might hold the president accountable.

So President Bush and Vice President Cheney get us to look the other way by focusing on the vague question of which candidate is "tough" enough to handle terrorists.

from the E. J. Dionne Jr. Washington Post Op-Ed "Rewriting The Record." (BTW: this post's title comes from a protest sign I saw in a newspaper photo published during coverage of the RNC.)

And as David Ignatius puts it:

Any analysis of Bush's anti-terrorism record has to be divided into pre-Sept. 11 and post-Sept. 11. And in both periods, there is considerable evidence to challenge Bush's contention that his actions have made the country safer.

from his Washington Post Op-Ed "Has Bush Made Us Safer?"

But, even though the public's confidence in Bush's leadership in this so-called war remains high, his administration's execution of it has been both shameless and inept:

Two-and-a-half years after he was captured in Afghanistan and detained by the U.S. military as an "enemy combatant," a prisoner at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been told he will be allowed to go home, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

from "Panel: Cuba Detainee Wrongly Named Enemy" in The Guardian. (Full story)

As has their execution of the war and "Post-war" in Iraq:

American interrogators working in Iraq have obtained as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence since a series of coercive practices like hooding, stripping and sleep deprivation were banned, a senior American official said Monday.

from "General Says Less Coercion of Captives Yields Better Data." (Full story at The New York Times | Related: USA Today story)

While the promise by Bush of the world being safer and more free from terrorism after the "completion" of the Iraq war has also proven to be a sad fallacy:

At least nine people have been killed and as many as 160 injured in a massive blast outside the Australian embassy in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.

from "Massive blast at Jakarta embassy." (Full story BBC News)

There are many more stories and examples just like these that I could cite but only a few in the media, like Bob Herbert, have been brave enough yet to start labeling Bush's policies on the Iraq war (or the War on Terror) as the failures that they are:

They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.

How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that President Bush's obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?

from the Op-Ed "How Many Deaths Will It Take?" in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, as has long been suspected by many pundits whose voices aren't being heard enough in the mainstream media, it looks like the "noble" cause of prosecuting the war on terror isn't even really a priority for the now-disgraced Neo-cons who drive the Bush Foreign Policy agenda and were largely responsible for getting the US into the war in Iraq in the first-place:

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own:

An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia... On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters.

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic.

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere [emphasis added].

from "The Chechens' American friends" by John Laughland. (Guardian)

So sadly, it looks like The Onion has, yet again, gotten it more right than many in the so-called "real media":

Bush Campaign More Thought Out Than Iraq War
WASHINGTON, DC—Military and political strategists agreed Monday that President Bush's re-election campaign has been executed with greater precision than the war in Iraq. "Judging from the initial misrepresentation of intelligence data and the ongoing crisis in Najaf, I assumed the president didn't know his ass from his elbow," said Col. Dale Henderson, a military advisor during the Reagan Administration. "But on the campaign trail, he's proven himself a master of long-term planning and unflinching determination. How else can you explain his strength in the polls given this economy?" Henderson said he regrets having characterized Bush's handling of the war as "incompetent," now that he knows the president's mind was simply otherwise occupied.

from the "News in Brief" column.

But finally, let's compare Cheney's now infamous campaign comments from last week:

"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States" (as published on CNN.com)

with one dictionary definition of the word "terrorism":

\Ter"ror*ism\, n. The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation [emphasis added]. --Jefferson.
(Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.)

In the immortal words of Killa Cam (?): "Pause...."

R.I.P. to all those whose lives were taken in the 9/11 attacks and all the innocent victims whose lives were taken in the subsequent Iraq & Afghanistan wars and the war on terror.

Posted by ian @ 1:10 AM | | | Permalink | << Click back to the Main Homepage