Wordyard

Rick Heller takes me to task for my post on Bush’s Baghdad trip. Apparently I showed “lack of graciousness” in my complaint that the whole thing was a costly photo-op. We should be glad, Heller says, that Bush took the risk: “For a leader to share some of the risk in which he has placed his troops is not only a morale boost for the troops, but also sobering for the leader. Furthermore, despite the virtual resources available, there is still no substitute for physical presence in order to gain a deeper understanding of a conflict.”

I don’t know whether Heller is just naive or is somehow so committed to the notion of being a “centrist” (as his blogroll labels suggest) that he has bent over backwards at this rare opportunity to praise an action by Bush. But c’mon! Can anyone believe that a two-hour touchdown is an effort to “gain a deeper understanding” of the conflict? It’s barely time to get through a holiday meal. Surely a leader interested in “deeper understanding of the conflict” would want to talk to more than just a handpicked cadre of U.S. soldiers. I understand that for security reasons Bush can’t pull a Henry V, don a disguise, and wander the streets of Baghdad talking to the common folk. But don’t tell me that a photo-op is a fact-finding mission!

As the post I linked to below suggested, the impact of the trip on morale is debatable. The one indisputable outcome of the visit was the opportunity to shoot the President offering a turkey to the troops.

If that footage doesn’t show up in Bush’s campaign advertisements before November, 2004, I will gladly apologize to Heller for my lack of graciousness. If it does, as I’m quite sure it will — unless the Iraq adventure turns into such a continuing debacle that the Bush campaign decides to run away from it entirely — then I will continue to feel justified in my cynical view.

President Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad was certainly a good thing to do. On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the whole thing was the political equivalent of what happens in Hollywood when the cast and crew are reassembled to reshoot a scene that the director realizes he botched. In this case, Karl Rove’s “Mission Accomplished” footage from May, with its flyer-garb bravado, has now become an albatross around Bush’s neck. The Bush campaign needed new political-commercial fodder. New location; same cast. Roll cameras. Only Bush gets to charge all production costs to the American people.

Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s report, quoting Kevin Maroney quoting a former Air Force officer, provides another perspective on the quickie visit: “First, let me say these little photo opportunities do nothing in raising the morale level. The people who Bush dined with were most assuredly hand selected.” Read more.

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a column by Daniel Henninger arguing that the war on terror is going to be as long a slog as the Cold War, and that we’d better create Cold-War-style institutions if we hope to win it.

Even as the ashes of the World Trade Center were raining down on New York, the right had begun piling long-cherished projects — like the neoconservative dream of regime change in Iraq — onto the new war-on-terror bandwagon. The essential maneuver here has been to take what could and should have been a very specific war the U.S. had to fight with the people who attacked us — a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida — and expand its scope and definition. The first step in this process was turning the “war with al-Qaida” into the “war on terror.” Never mind that “terror” is a notoriously ill-defined word; never mind that a “war on terror” is a war without clearly defined goals or well understood conditions for victory.

That’s the whole point: First, declare war on terror; then, label whoever you want to fight as a “terrorist.” That lets you keep the war going as long as you want; that lets you redefine it on the fly. It also helps you distract people from seeing that we haven’t done a very good job of prosecuting the real, specific war on al-Qaida, whose leader we still have not killed or captured.

Back to Henninger, and his definition of our new Cold War-style destiny: “The threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.”

This is an extraordinary paragraph. Why in the world is Henninger resorting to such convoluted language? “The proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction”? Is that what we’re fighting?

Note that Henninger’s definition — which seems practically tailor-made to cover historical events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki — bizarrely excludes the 9/11 attackers themselves: Their weapons were box-cutters, and it took no particular arcane technical knowledge (beyond some basic piloting lessons) for them to transform innocent jetliners into machines of terrible destruction.

But Henninger has to write this way if his definition of the war on terror is going to cover the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. And we now know with near-certainty that Iraq had essentially no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Ahh, but somewhere in Iraq was “the technical knowledge beneath” such weapons, and in time that could be turned against us.

It’s a slippery slope, Mr. Henninger. Once you leave behind the clear-eyed truth that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. and al-Qaida is who we should be fighting, there is no end to the mischief you can get the nation into. President Bush cast us in a global war with the Axis of Evil; suddenly, thanks to 9/11, we were fighting Iran, Iraq and North Korea, too. Now, according to Henninger, we are at war with nothing less than “the proliferation of technical knowledge”!

Alas, wars undertaken against the proliferation of knowledge don’t have a very good track record in human history — just ask the book-burners of the Reformation. You could lock away all the nuclear-bomb formulas and recipes for sarin, you could shut down the entire Internet, you could plunge half the world into the Stone Age — and angry, dispossessed or malicious people could still figure out ways to kill and destroy on a frighteningly large scale. The real war is against ignorance, not knowledge.

So now we know how President Bush and the Republicans plan to spend their obscene $200 million uncontested-primary-season war chest: By repeating lies.

Today’s New York Times reports on the first Bush campaign ads that are scheduled to run beginning this Sunday in Iowa. Predictably, the ads extol Bush for his “strong and principled leadership,” suggest that the Democrats are calling “for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others,” and “urge viewers to tell Congress ‘to support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.’ “

But the most outrageous claim — one truly Orwellian in its rhetorical sleight-of-hand — is a line that reads, “Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.” (So much for all the claims Bush once made that he would not play politics with the “war on terrorism.”)

Now, there are probably some people who have “attacked the president for attacking the terrorists” — meaning, criticized the president’s response to 9/11 in going after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But there aren’t many. None of Bush’s leading rivals among the Democrats are among them. Nor are the vast majority of Democrats. When “attacking the terrorists” really meant attacking the terrorists — when it meant trying to apprehend the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden and his sponsors — America and its allies were as close to united as they have ever been. (Bush’s postwar failures in Afghanistan are another story. And bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. Wait — I hope saying that doesn’t count as “attacking the president for attacking the terrorists”!)

What “some are now attacking the president for,” of course, is not for “attacking the terrorists” but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq. The president’s Iraq policy is now hurting him politically, given the utter collapse of the administration’s case for the war and the continuing carnage in the post-war war. So the Karl Rove prescription now emerges: (a) Revive the lie that preceded the war — the equation of Saddam Hussein with 9/11’s al-Qaida plotters; (b) ignore the many ways it has been discredited; (c) repeat until re-elected.

Rove’s thinking is cunning: After all, if the pre-war bluster was successful in persuading two-thirds of the American people that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, why shouldn’t the Republicans keep playing that card for all it’s worth? Turn “The Terrorists” into an all-purpose bogeyman: The President is attacking The Terrorists. If you attack the president, you’re helping The Terrorists. Case closed. Election won.

The scary thing is, it has a good chance of working.