Rumsfeld Dances on the Edge of Reality

In one of the most remarkable distortions of reality and the English language – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday blamed the press for focusing on bad news in Iraq and said: “To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks.” Yes, he really said that! I have read the line over and over, both as stated, and in context with his other remarks, and I must say I can only respond with: “What??”

I realize that the administration is devoting all of its energies these days to waging a veritable PR war to prove to the American people that contrary to everything we see and hear in the news (and we have Google News so we can read 10,000 newspapers across the globe) the war in Iraq is actually going very well, despite the insurgency, and we are determined to achieve “VICTORY”. Oh, that’s right; I forgot to mention that one of the critical phases of this PR campaign is to redefine victory from what we claimed it was a year or so ago. Given this, I suppose Rumsfeld’s comments are just a logical extension of the current spin – victory can be achieved while daily terrorist attacks occur, such as the one today in Baghdad at the main police academy that killed 43 and wounded at least 70 others.

The Bush Administration continues to count on the basic ignorance of Americans about foreign policy and the widespread blind patriotism inspired by 9-11: the feeling is that most people will buy into this bullshit and trust the guys at the top to do the right thing.

Of course, they just can’t get the more educated layer of our intelligentsia to go along, so President Bush’s speech tomorrow to the Council on Foreign Relations – “an august group of scholars, policymakers and journalists” – will break with tradition and permit no questions from the audience at the conclusion of his nearly one hour long address about the current status of the Iraq War. I guess that is a smart move, since the President, as well as the more intellectual members of the administration, are clearly unable to respond to questions that target the real situation on the ground in Iraq, like why it is really not all coming apart at the seams when it sure as hell looks that way to anybody with a brain.

Better to blame the media for reporting the bad news – perhaps they should look harder for pretty, happy stories to report. Maybe they could just step over the bodies of those 43 dead Iraqis and the 10 marines that died the other day and find a nice human interest story about somebody in Iraq who was happy to have us there. These days, I bet a story like that might make front page news …