Iraq: Trying to spin the unspinnable
The last time Bush was publicly upbeat
on Iraq was August 30
"Oh, I know the news is full with terrible suiciders,
and it shakes our will. I know that," he said
"But when you really think about it,
amazing progress has been made"
The administration of US President George W Bush, for example, when faced with a public outcry over Iraq, has with great effectiveness disseminated expertly crafted, razor-sharp talking points into the ether to persuade voters to believe what they hear and not what they see.
The power of spin is not infinite, however, as the administration is now discovering.
The consequences of its invasion of Iraq are now so transparently catastrophic that Republican control of Congress is threatened in the November 7 mid-term elections, in which Iraq is the hot-button issue.
Bad news has cascaded out of Iraq at such an astonishing pace that it defies credulity to suggest that the war has not drastically worsened the lives of Iraqis. At the same time, the initial rationale for the war has itself been further undermined.
The administration has nevertheless tried to spin the unspinnable as the elections near, with many Republican candidates fighting for their political lives and choosing to distance themselves from the White House on Iraq.
Only the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the US has offered the administration any respite, providing an opportunity it did not squander to tell voters, ad nauseam, that Iraq is the front line of its "war on terror".
The most immediate public relations challenge facing the administration is Iraq's civil war. The United Nations now estimates that 100 Iraqis at least are dying every day in sectarian violence.
Dozens of bodies turn up daily in Baghdad, the victims of torture and execution by death squads, and bombs in public spaces turn everyday life into slaughter. Baghdad's central morgue alone counted 1,536 violent deaths in August.
President Bush's feeble response has been to split hairs, calling Iraq a "bloody campaign of sectarian violence" but not a civil war. The American people err on the other side of the semantic fence, however. A CBS News poll in June showed that 82% believed civil war was under way.
At the same time, most polls show that Americans do not believe the situation is likely to improve. Public cynicism, unlike official pronouncement, is firmly rooted in the worsening realities on the ground, as two recent events have made apparent.
First was the revelation on September 11 of a classified report written by the chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps in Iraq, who concluded that the United States had lost control of al-Anbar, Iraq's western, Sunni-dominated province. The political situation there was beyond repair, he said, and the US military and insurgents had fought to a "stalemate".
Second is the debate in the Iraqi parliament over federalism, which threatens to bring down the government and tear the country apart.
At issue is an October 22 deadline, put in place over Sunni objections by the constitution passed last year, for the mechanisms for federalism to be established.
In addition to Sunni Arabs, some Shi'ite groups, notably backers of nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, oppose any legislation that would create independent regional blocs with control of their own resources and security.
As Iraq tears itself apart, US forces continue dying in large numbers. Nearly 2,700 have perished and 20,000 have been injured, and there is no end in sight - in recent testimony before Congress, Pentagon officials said US troops could remain for five years or longer.
Spinning this catalogue of doom has been understandably difficult. The last time Bush was publicly upbeat on Iraq was August 30. "Oh, I know the news is full with terrible suiciders, and it shakes our will. I know that," he said. "But when you really think about it, amazing progress has been made."
The shift in emphasis is noticeable. "During 170 minutes of speeches containing more than 20,000 words, Bush did not once repeat the phrase 'amazing progress', and he made only fleeting reference to the Iraqi elections, the unity government and the advances in security that had been the mainstay of his previous addresses," wrote Marc Sandalow in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 8.
As electoral defeat looms, rather than portraying Iraq as a success story unheralded by the ambulance-chasing media (as was his wont), Bush now switches the topic to a proven winner, conflating Iraq with the "war on terror".
"The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq, so America will not leave until victory is achieved," he said recently.
The Iraq-al-Qaeda connection was one of the original justifications for the war, of course, with officials contending that Saddam Hussein had given al-Qaeda contractor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi safe haven.
But in a startling blow to Bush, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on September 8 that its investigations had found no evidence of any link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, including the Zarqawi theory.
Bush's contention that Iraq was now a hub of al-Qaeda-inspired activities was given a boost by the same study that concluded that Anbar was a lost cause.
That study also concluded that no government institutions were functioning in Anbar and that al-Qaeda in Iraq was the most significant political player in the province.
The problem for Bush, however, is that many Americans are now connecting the dots and realizing that Bush's own actions brought terrorism to Iraq. So his pleas to stay the course and fix the problem he created can only garner limited sympathy.
With the Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden still at large, Bush is also being pilloried once again for diverting resources from an unfinished war to an unnecessary one.
Even as Bush tells Americans to stay the course, appealing to their sense of duty, Vice President Dick Cheney does the dirty work by implying that it is treachery to say otherwise. Anyone who says US troops must be withdrawn, Cheney said recently, "validates the strategy of the terrorists".
"The people obviously are frustrated because of the difficulty, because of the cost and the casualties, but you cannot look at Iraq in isolation," he continued. "You have to look at it within the context of the broader global war on terror ... If Saddam Hussein were still in power, we would be in a vastly worse position."
This bullish attempt to continue tying Saddam to the "war on terror", despite the recent Senate investigation, demonstrates what little faith the administration has in the US public's collective memory or ability to discern spin from reality.
It's a strategy that has worked in elections past, but there are signs that the administration has tried to sell this bridge once too often. Cheney's stubbornness may shore up support from Bush's base on the right, but the middle may be dropping out - indeed the poll numbers are sobering.
Some polls show that as many as six in 10 Americans now believe that invading Iraq was a mistake, which makes all the more astonishing Cheney's recent statements that the US would have done so even if the Central Intelligence Agency had told the president that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
In a poll by Zogby International, 58% of respondents said the Iraq war had not been worth the cost in American lives, and other polls suggest the number of Americans who believe Iraq was a major part of the "war on terror" is as low as 32%.
As public support drains away, Bush's rhetoric has become more extreme. "They made clear that the most important front in their struggle against America is Iraq," said Bush, referring to letters between al-Qaeda leaders.
"Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as [Vladimir] Lenin and [Adolf] Hitler before them. The question is, will we listen?"
The polls suggest that Americans are not listening, and have become somewhat inured to such hyperbole. Years of unrelenting war have stripped away their belief that the Republicans can unlock Iraq's blood-soaked riddle or that they should be allowed to keep trying.
Ashraf Fahim/Asia Times