February 13, 2005

It has been another of America’s special, sacred Januaries: The American Dream itself has been wheeled out of storage, washed and waxed, and buffed to a high quadrennial shine. Once again we have demonstrated to the world (as if we really cared what they thought) that anyone -- any white male, anyway -- can become president.

This year, we actually improved on that old, traditional American value. We have shown that anyone can do it a second time, even if they used their first term to wage an optional war, at terrible expense in blood and treasure, on grounds that proved to be, as many said before the shooting started, completely bogus, and put the nation in far greater peril than it was before the pre-emptive shooting started. And, instead of a dream, we have a nightmare.

Nothing Succeeds Like Excess

A lot of people apparently found the president’s ambitious inaugural address, which all but vowed to expunge the word tyranny from the world’s dictionaries, a bit startling. They expected a more restrained approach from a man who had just barely won the election (and that only through massive fraud and voter suppression) and whose war on terror, according to the CIA’s own in-house think-tank, is creating more terrorists than it’s killing.

A sentence from a Seymour Hersh article in The New Yorker resolves this conundrum: Bush’s election is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. In other words, on Planet Bush, if you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, your lies must be the truth.

Far from being daunted by results which the rest of the world seems to see as utter failure, the Bush administration, according to Hersh’s article, has apparently only just begun. For instance, the U.S. is already conducting hostile, covert military action in Iran. To many members of Congress, this undoubtedly came as a surprise. That’s no accident -- it was supposed to.

Hersh writes that through a series of findings and executive orders, Mr. Bush has delegated to Donald Rumsfeld the task of democratizing not just Iran, but the whole of the Middle East. Minus, of course, cooperative-but-autocratic dictatorships like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. In Pakistan, Hersh says, we’ve given Mr. A.Q. “Nukes-R-Me” Khan a get-out-of-jail-free card, and we wink at President Pervez Musharraf’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal, so our clandestine operatives can flit from Washap to Kuhak without having to pass through customs.

Who’s Funding Terrorists Now?

A few members of the gung-ho gang seem willing to admit, off the record, that a thing or two didn’t go quite right in Iraq. But they argue that lessons were learned in Iraq, and so future pre-emptive, unilateral wars will undoubtedly go better.

It’s not clear what lessons were learned in Afghanistan, or who learned them. Last year’s opium crop broke all records, even those set by the Taliban, when they were actively encouraging poppy farming. Under the accommodating Mr. Musharraf, this branch of agriculture is booming. Unfortunately, that metaphorical boom is translating into actual booms, because the profits are funding terrorists.

Perhaps it would have been better if Mr. Bush had followed through on his promise to catch Osama bin Laden, rather than leave him astride the opium trail where he, or others of a like mind, can tax it.

The Pentagon’s hired spokesman, Lawrence DiRita, said last Monday that Hersh’s article did not do justice to the global challenge posed by the Iranian regime’s apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organizations. Hersh’s article was so riddled with errors of fundamental fact, said Mr. DiRita, that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.

Apparently the standards for journalists are higher than those for Secretary of State.

The Called-Off Search for WMDs

For the record, the U.S. invaded Iraq because, if we had waited another month or so, Saddam was likely to nuke us. So said Condi Rice. He also had huge supplies of chemical and/or biological weapons. Donald Rumsfeld knew right where they were. Those were not suppositions, those were facts.

However, those facts have now been replaced with new facts. One such new fact is that last December the administration abandoned all hope of finding the nukes and the gasses and the germs. This should not come as a great surprise. This administration managed to lose 388 tons of high explosives, and can only seem to find it a few pounds at a time, when it blows up our poorly-armored troops.

Republicans Spend Money For Propaganda But Not For Veterans

While the Republicans dismissed Chris smith, the New Jersey Republican because he argued for full funding for VA hospitals, they have no problem about spending money for propaganda purposes. The $241,000 the Bush administration paid to Armstrong Williams to promote No child Left Behind could have bought a lot of wheelchairs. And, as the Washington Post reported, Maggie Gallagher got $20,000 for writing about how the government could perform the vital constitutional function of protecting marriage.

The Iraqi Election

Well, so what have we gotten for our $200 billion, our thirteen hundred-plus dead, our ten thousand and more wounded, and our lost global stature? It’s not what we went to war for, but it’s about all we’ve got: on January 30, we got an election -- a Middle Eastern version of Dodge City.

A lot of people are very dubious about the success of this venture. But all the official government experts say it will all work out fine. And only those cursed with memory will recall that the official experts were saying much the same about Vietnam -- that is, until the Tet Offensive happened, thirty-seven years ago on Monday.

Steve Fowle is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War and is the publisher and editor of The New Hampshire Gazette, the nation’s oldest newspaper.

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