Surrealpolitik

Ron Suskind's latest book offers new details about how the Bush White House has used theological certainty to mask political expediency -- facts be damned.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, CIA, Opinion, Torture, Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, al-qaida, Iraq War, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Abu Zubaydah

June 22, 2006 | On the night of June 12, shortly after Karl Rove received an e-mail from his attorney, Robert Luskin, informing him he would not be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the president's chief political advisor appeared before a New Hampshire Republican Party group to deliver a call to arms for the midterm elections. Rove defined the theme for the upcoming contest, the last one of the Bush presidency, as the same one he had set after Sept. 11, 2001, when he ordered Republicans to polarize the country on the issue of terrorism and war. Democrats were weak and soft, he said; Republicans, strong and tough. Now, with Bush's popularity at low ebb, Rove instructed the party to taint the Democrats as favoring "cutting and running" in Iraq.

The following week, on cue, the Republicans introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives against any "timetable" for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Overnight the divided and dispirited Republicans turned the tables on the Democrats. Even as the Democrats issued a program calling for a "new direction," their own version of the 1994 Republican Contract With America, which carefully did not mention Iraq, they scattered in different directions upon mention of the war. Instilling discipline in their ranks would be a forbidding task even for a pack leader like Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." It was just as Rove had reckoned.

The House resolution passed easily last week and has moved on to the Senate, where Democratic divisions have once again been highlighted. The resolution has no binding authority, but instead is a purely political contrivance. No hearings have been held. Indeed, Congress as a body enforcing its constitutional mandate of oversight is virtually defunct. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is passive in its being trampled. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has put out a distorted report casting blame solely on the CIA for intelligence failures on the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Senate Armed Services Committee refuses to summon for testimony the commanding generals in Iraq who have called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Republican Senate this week voted against investigating the abuses of contractors in Iraq. Yet the Republicans are desperate to stage a symbolic vote on the war.

The Iraq resolution is above all a manifesto of articles of faith. We face "an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values" -- not an insurgency against an occupation or a sectarian civil war. Then, "by early 2003," Saddam Hussein "supported terrorists" -- suggesting nonexistent links to al-Qaida. Now, "the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war" -- suggesting that the effect is its own cause, not that terrorism has emerged in reaction against the U.S. occupation. Finally, we "will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary." Thus we battle one enemy despite his many faces, like Satan, and our goal is nothing mundane like stability or a political solution but "freedom." Inserted into this credo is the tactical twist against a "timetable" -- though Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, submitted a plan, a timetable, in November 2005 to Rumsfeld, at his insistence, for withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops this year. None dare call it "cut and run."

The Republicans' tone of theological certainty covers their anxious expediency. In the clarifying polarization of Congress the lethal netherworld of Iraq is held at bay. The politics of the Iraq resolution are the congressional analogue of Bush's recent five-hour visit to the Green Zone intended to present an upbeat message, leaving unacknowledged, for example, a 23-point cable sent at the same time from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department chronicling the descent of Iraqi embassy employees into sectarian strife and fundamentalist Islamic strictures, putting their "objectivity, civility, and logic" under relentless siege.

For the White House, the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on June 8 became a platform for retailing old talking points, claims of eventual victory and strained appeals to history. Some perspective was provided at the beginning of this week's debate on the Senate's Iraq resolution with the publication of a new book, "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11," by Ron Suskind. Its facts cast light on the basic operations of the Bush White House, though facts have a discounted value in the current environment.

On June 14, the Pentagon dispatched a document titled "Iraq Floor Debate Prep Book" to Republicans in the House. A Pentagon public affairs officer admitted to the Washington Post that the 74-page document originated in the White House but was repackaged as a Pentagon publication. It is a cut-and-paste rush job to refute advocates of "cut and run." It is also a representative document of the Bush administration: Evidence is cherry-picked, slogans substitute for facts, falsehoods are sold as truth, and "victory" is promised. Connections between al-Qaida and Iraq are slyly hinted at. The old accusations against Jose Padilla as the "dirty bomber," no longer being pressed against him, reappear. The Pentagon document, eagerly seized upon by congressional Republicans as a treasure trove of talking points, accurately gauges the White House's estimate of their ability to assess information on their own.

On the day the Pentagon talking points were sent to the House Republicans, Bush reformulated compassionate conservatism to demonstrate his concern for the continuing loss of life in Iraq. "I'm like most Americans, it is -- death affects my way of thinking."

On June 18, White House press secretary Tony Snow attempted to put recent events in historical perspective: "The president understands people's impatience -- not impatience, but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I daresay people would have said, 'Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?' But you cannot conduct a war based on polls." Snow's analogy was the latest effort to compare Bush and his troubles to the difficulties of previous presidents, from Lincoln to Truman. His reference to the Battle of the Bulge was an original contribution. In that battle, fought in December 1944, Hitler concentrated his remaining forces on the western front for a final desperate assault to break the inevitable Allied drive across the Rhine, and failed. In fact, there are polls available from that time. The American people were not impatient. They knew victory was coming. And their support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been reelected to his fourth term a month before, increased to 72 percent.

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