Iraq War: Illusions and delusions

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

I know I cite Bob "the Daily Howler" Somersby here all the time. I still often find him irritating as all get-out.

But as time goes on, I seem to be becoming more and more of a disciple. At least on his specialty, the current pathetic state of the American "press corps."

I thought of the Howler when I read this article: The tipping point by Geov Parrish, WorkingforChange.com 06/17/05.

The tipping point he's discussing is the "tipping point" in American public opinion on Iraq. As we're starting to see, now that large majorities are reaching a Jacksonian understanding of the Iraq War - that it's a doomed effort initiated on lies and prosecuted on illusions - even our elected representatives are starting to notice. But my Howler moment came when I read this:

Something's got to give. It doesn't seem to be likely that it will be the Bush White House, stuck deeply in denial about how badly things are going. Finally, American media seems to be getting the picture, and with it, the American public. And if the White House isn't about to change its policies -- by, for example, vastly increasing the number of troops on the ground, a course of action suggested by the New York Times' Tom Friedman on Wednesday -- it's going to be the war itself that will change. For the worse.

The U.S. strategy in Iraq is now to train and deploy as many Iraqi troops as possible, to eventually replace American forces. That policy has, to put it mildly, been a disaster. Even in an economy with few other jobs available, few Iraqis have proven willing to work for the Americans; of the ones who do, many are undertrained and underequipped, and in some parts of the countryas many as three quarters of them wind up taking their equipment and defecting to the insurgents. Few are willing to fight fellow Iraqis. (my emphasis)

Say what? The media are getting and therefore so is the American public. Uh, no, Geov. Not really even close. Despite the pathological malfunction of the American press, which is scarcely able any longer to perform their news function in a manner meeting the minimum needs of a democracy, a large majority of the public has still been able to figure out what a hopeless mess Bush's excellent Mesopotamian adventure is.

And yet, a liberal like Geov Parrish - I believe Parrish positions himself as more of a "radical" than a "liberal" - in an article like this is still not able to say clearly what's been staring us in the face, chewing on our noses, and beating us on the ears for the last decade and a half: that our "press corps" is become badly dysfunctional at its role as the "Fourth Estate" in a democracy. Corporate bias in the press is hardly a new phenomenon. Ask any labor activist. What is new is the degree to which the profit imperatives of infotainment have overwhelmed basic press functions of news gathering, reporting and analysis.

In fact, in the light of the poll numbers on the Iraq War that Parrish cites, I've been thinking that it's a sign of the "press corps'" decadence that we're not hearing any press chatter about a "credibility gap," a famous phrase from the Vietnam War era. But those numbers clearly reflect the fact that a clear majority of the people, a good sensible Jacksonian majority, no longer believe the bloated promises and lying excuses from the President, the Vice President, the odious Secretary of Defense and a bevy of generals, colonels and assorted Pentagon propaganda flaks.

Yes, Dick Cheney said just a couple of weeks ago that the insurgency in Iraq is in its "last throes" and that most American troops would be coming home from there during this second Bush administration. Did you notice our sad excuse for a press corps challenging those ludicrous and baseless claims? No, they were too busy covering the Michael Jackson trial and covering their own lazy behinds for not reporting on the "Downing Street Memo."

This is a moment that is likely to sink deep into the "memory hole" of conventional wisdom very soon. But it's worth pausing for a moment to notice: a large majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq War. A large majority have realized our civilian and military leaders are lying like a bunch of Enron executives about every aspect of the thing. And they came to that conclusions while our so-called "press corps" has for the most part been lying down and playing dead in front of the Bush administration's war propaganda.

No, public opinion is not changing because of improved media reporting. The national press, which has been endlessly babbling about Bush's unshakeable popularity while his popularity and that of his Iraq War have been heading toward the cellar, is finally waking up to the fact that most Americans don't support Bush's war in Iraq.

Parrish cites the delusional proposal of Tom Friedman, one of the biggest of the Big Pundits, about how to deal with Iraq. But then he himself concludes with the following fantasy:

Eventually, the only real solution to this mess will have to be some sort of truly international peacekeeping force, probably one organized through the U.N. The problem is that no matter how much domestic and Congressional pressure is devoted to such an approach, the Bush team is likely to be too stubborn to resort to it. The result, for the next three years or so, seems likely to be massive and unnecessary bloodshed in Iraq, and, eventually, a voter backlash against the Republicans.

My first reaction to this was, an international "peacekeeping" force? Going in with no semblance of a peace to keep? How loony is that? We can go back to the discussion of 2002-3 about such a possibility. There are only a few countries that could provide troops on anything like the scale needed, including France, Germany, Britain, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, China and Vietnam. Let's see, which of those are likely to step up to the plate?

That may have been a possibility - a distant one, but possible - if a Kerry administration had taken office in January. But it seems silly to be talking about that now. The American exit from Iraq is very likely to resemble France's exit from Algeria and Indochina and America's exit from Vietnam. Except, as Daniel Ellsberg says, it will be much harder to get out of Iraq than out of Vietnam.

But if there were to be a serious American attempt to exit Iraq during this administration - virtually unthinkable, but theoretically possible - the US would have to make some effort to do just this.  Juan Cole at his Informed Consent blog this past week talked about various aspects of just such a proposal.  The discussion begins on 06/20/05 ("The United Nations Strategy as a Resolution of the Iraq Crisis") and continues over the next several days.  He also links to this diary entry at Daily Kos, which also discusses his proposal at some length.