The familiar props are rolled out,
like the well-worn and peeling painted backdrop
for a production of a traveling
Victorian theatrical troupe
The audience is expected
to watch with rapt fascination,
as though they had never seen this show before
Bush Poses with His Boys
The usual atmospherics are pumped up
- sudden panic and fear, an elusive and
ubiquitous enemy that assumes many guises and shapes,
cherry-picked information to provide
a patina of verisimilitude to the danger,
followed by a march of authority figures to rescue us
Cooking the Terrorist Threat, AgainBush's Jihad Recruitment Drive
One of the more memorable and revealing statements explaining the nature of the Bush Regime's build-up to the invasion of Iraq was offered in September 2002 by then White House chief of staff Andrew Card.
"From a marketing point of view," he said, "you don't introduce new products in August."
Five years later, a period longer than the Civil War and World War II, the administration is preparing to present its case for continuing the surge in Iraq.
But rather than waiting for September, when Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to deliver his report, the administration has moved up the marketing to July.
The familiar props are rolled out, like the well-worn and peeling painted backdrop for a production of a traveling Victorian theatrical troupe, and members of the audience are expected to watch with rapt fascination, as though they had never seen this show before.
The negative response to the preview does not alter the same old script.
The usual atmospherics are pumped up -- sudden panic and fear, an elusive and ubiquitous enemy that assumes many guises and shapes, cherry-picked information to provide a patina of verisimilitude to the danger, followed by a march of authority figures to rescue us.
For the embattled Bush, filled with "self-confidence," the "motives" he doesn't wish critics to examine turn out to be far more utopian than the military success of the surge, as he explained to his conservative interlocutors.
"There is such a thing as the universality of freedom. I strongly believe that Muslims desire to be free just like Methodists desire to be free."
Beneath the seething chaotic violence, beyond the tribal and religious strife, past the civil war, the Iraqis, according to the president, under their robes are no different from American Methodists.
There's nothing more to understand. If only we can prevail, they can be just like us. The rest is marketing.
Following the recent hyped-up 'terror' attacks in the UK, I saw a headline "Doctor Accused in Glasgow Attack Described as Loner Angry about Iraq War." Isn't it pathetic that what strikes us as utterly predictable still eludes President Daydream Believer?
A common right-wing talking point is that we weren't in Iraq on 9/11 and they still attacked us.
Yes, but this "war" is a numbers game: before we invaded Iraq, how many young Muslim men were ready to join up for a suicide mission against the west?
Some, but my guess is, not very many.
But now? My guess is very many.
The exact opposite of what the president says is true: because we're there, this shit is going to follow us home.
You could probably make up a chart with incidents and images on one side, and the number of terrorist recruits on the other. The abuses at Abu Graib: 25,478 Muslim men decide to strap on the suicide belt.
Pictures of Saddam getting probed after he was captured: 962 vow jihad on America. Hidatha: 6,089 more.
Of course, I'm making these numbers up, and we'll never know what the real numbers are.
But every time I see on the news pictures of our "surge" -- that is, pictures of American troops knocking some Iraqi's door in, women wailing, men blindfolded on the ground while an infidel writes on their neck in magic marker -- I think, yep, there's another X amount of really, really pissed off Muslims who are going to do something about it.
The other thing I hear on the news -- that I realized I wasn't really hearing, and which most of us I think do not hear -- is the names we give to the people we're fighting over there.
You hear that American troops killed so many "terrorists" or "insurgents" or "gunmen," or sometimes, just "the enemy."
But in Anbar, for example, we're now fighting alongside Sunnis who recently were trying to kill us. So they were "terrorists" or "insurgents" or the "enemy", but now I guess they're not. Whew.
Bill Maher