It is very well and clearly known here in the White House, and in the Pentagon, and in Langley and up at Ft. George Meade, that Osama bin Laden is as dead as Marley’s ghost, having expired in a Pakistani military hospital in 2002 of kidney failure.

These grotesque and very convenient tapes are being produced by the CIA in Texas and have been since 2003. I guess the duct tape and the color-coded ‘terror alerts’ have worn too thin so now we have a return to the tapes and the cries of imminent doom from our prevaricating, brainless president. Even the obedient press is treating this latest propaganda ploy with some quiet disdain.

And the second, and also fully expected, propaganda game will be General Petraeus’ White House-scripted lecture to Congress. He will solemnly tell us what Bush has ordered him to say: That the famous Surge is really working and that America must support her really effective military in finally beating the evil Muslims. Which, of course, we are now doing, under the inspired leadership of President Bush and General Petraeus. In fact, Petreaus is another Bush lap dog, just like the unlamented British PM Blair.

Note that no senior military officer would dare to contradict Bush’s wishes unless he wanted to be sacked on the spot. This would be entertaining theater if so many young Americans were not being killed or savagely wounded. Of course Americans don’t care if we roast the entire civilian population of Baghdad in the process of helping Bush to create a false legacy of sternness and resolve.

This, children, is a terrible reprise of the Vietnam disaster down to babbling politicians and lying general officers who dithered around, doing nothing while tens of thousands of young Americans were killed or crippled.

All that remains is for the Arab resistance movement to have their own Tet offensive to put the cap on the rerun. If a large transport plane full of troops was shot down (as they tried to shoot down a plane full of Congressmen recently…all in all, a wonderful idea) with 200-300 dead, then the public would wake up and begin to bite the hands that they feed.

A Greek writer once said, and this is presently a very pregnant phrase, that boys kill frogs for sport but the frogs die in earnest. Young Americans are dying every day while Bush pours over plans for his presidential library and decided on the color of the drapery.

Impeach him and fire his worthless, lackey generals.”

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Walk Away from the Lies: A Recommendation to General Petraeus from a Foreign Service Officer

by John Brown

johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.September 9, 2007

www.CommonDreams.org

Dear General Petraeus,

In the coming week you will be briefing Congress and the nation regarding the situation in Iraq, specifically on the so-called “surge.”

You will be providing statistics and other data to show the accomplishments of your counterinsurgency measures. Your report will doubtless repeat what you wrote three years ago in the Washington Post (September 25, 2004): “Now … 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress.”

You will, of course, also cite failures and disappointments. This will give the necessary “balance” to your presentation to make it sound as credible as possible. You will say that much work remains to be done, that the road ahead is a difficult one, but that with Americans’ support our military will get the job done in Iraq.

In other words, General, you will be deluding the public. Report after report — take the latest one from GAO, for example — shows that we are not “winning” in Iraq. The stealth visit of President Bush to Anbar province — under the cover of darkness, in a fortified camp, which reminded commentators of a moon landing - only confirms how precarious the situation has become in that country.

General, we are not “winning” in Iraq for one basic reason: Our army is an occupying force. We Americans are foreigners in a devastated country that did not ask for (and is increasingly disillusioned by) our “help.” And our occupation is rendered all the less tenable because we are unable to explain convincingly to Iraqis why we invaded their land in the first place — and why we must remain there. No matter how many “insurgents” we kill, no matter how many doors we kick down in downtrodden Baghdad neighborhoods searching for the “enemy,” we cannot provide security (not to speak of democracy) to the local population because we cannot win over their hearts and minds due to the simple and brutal fact that we are occupiers.

As a Foreign Service officer for over twenty years, General, I served in countries that were under or had been under Soviet occupation: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine. The Soviets may have talked about “socialist brotherhood” but the inhabitants of these countries remained unconvinced. That is because the Soviets and their local surrogates proclaimed eternal friendship while trying to impose their will by the barrel of a gun. Soviet embassies in Eastern Europe — reminiscent of the monstrous one we are building in Baghdad — were a symbol of oppression.

General, you know how much the good name of another, once highly respected, military officer, Colin Powell, has suffered as a result of his deceptive declarations about Iraq during his tenure as Secretary of State. History will probably remember him — and not favorably — for his speech at the United Nations that tried to justify, with misleading evidence, the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

When you speak before the Congress, General, may I suggest that, instead of promising “victory” in Iraq, you might follow the small step that two of my Foreign Service colleagues and I undertook in opposition to Mr. Bush’s war: you should announce your resignation from your commission, as one more effort to help bring an illegitimate war to an end.

This — and not more ambivalent statements justifying the president’s destructive and immoral misadventure — is perhaps the best that you, as a government official, can do for our country in this difficult period.

Simply, General, it is time to stop the lying, and time for you to walk away from the lies.

John Brown, who was in the Foreign Service for over twenty years, now compiles the “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review,” available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.