If you hadn’t noticed yet, the marketing of the Bush Legacy is slowly pumping up a narrative on Iraq – the war is won and Bush won it. In marketing/propaganda, what is actually true or real isn’t important. Rather, it is what you can convince people is the truth or the reality.
As a WH aide (likely Rove) said to Ron Suskind:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
Analysts and military historians who stand outside of the Bush/conservative movement sphere have carefully detailed the ways in which “the war is won” claim is false and deceitful in intent. Even the much more modest claim that “the surge was successful” denies the uncomfortable facts of the limited geography of Iraq affected by Petraeus’ policies and the ethnic cleansing and balkanization which preceded it, etc.
But the people who have some interest in promoting this propagandist narrative have been pumping this one up for a while now and they’ll continue. Take today’s editorial in the WSJ by William McGurn (who happens to have been the chief speechwriter for Bush until Feb ’08, who was a bureau chief at National Review and who had been an executive with Murdoch’s Newscorp…your classic unbiased and trustworthy political observer).
Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq
It’s a twofer title: 1) Bush won the war and 2) this was a ‘sin’ (to those internal enemies of American gooditude). Who those traitorous baddies are gets suggested in the first paragraph:
In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation’s capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on.
But reality isn’t quite as described in that bit in red. Bush carries with him the near universal opprobrium of the citizens of his own country, of the citizens of the rest of the world, and of American historians. Pretending that this opprobrium is confined to “Washington insiders” plays on the anti-elite mythologies of rightwing populism and attempts to deceive through ommission of the breadth of the “opprobrium”. Further, in this case, as in most such cases, the person claiming disdain for the Washington insider is himself a classic example of exactly that.
The piece goes on in a predictable manner with a reminder of Viet Nam and how the internal baddies fucked that up too, how Bush’s opponents just can’t bring themselves to speak well of the surge and admit he got something right. Irrational Bush-hatred from the elites…so unfair to this magnificent example of an American president.
And we get the narrative twist I’ve been pointing to previously.
Mr. Bush’s success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush’s secretary of defense — not something you do with a failure.
Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor’s approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America’s home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway’s received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.
The retention of Gates proves that Bush’s policies and strategies regarding Iraq must be the right ones. We wonder if McGurn’s logic would lead him to an identical claim that Bush’s retention of Tenet would prove the correctness of Clinton’s intel policies and strategies? We guess not. This is a fallacious and deceitful claim and quite ignores the value of any new administration retaining competent people who have run complex and important posts, and the converse folly of removing everyone associated with a prior administration.
And, we again have the implication that Obama can bring nothing beneficial to the Iraq equation, all he might do is meekly reproduce the boldness and under-appreciated strategic vision of Bush.
But McGurn isn’t out to make citizens smarter or more educated or more thoughtful. He’s out to make you stupider through ommissions and deceits and spin. He’s an arse.
Column can be read here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123241360913796235.html
Update: Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard (the Murdoch owned neoconservative mouthpiece) on McGurn’s piece:
Obama has inherited victory in Iraq. Bush has done more than, as McGurn quotes Biden in early 2007, “keep it from totally collapsing…[until he could] hand it off to the next guy.” Now rather than retreat in defeat, our new president must manage to withdraw American troops without undermining their success. It will be a tremendous challenge, but the press will not be able to blame Bush if security deteriorates in Iraq after Obama gives the Joint Chiefs their “new mission.” The victory in Iraq is Obama’s to lose.
Victory in Iraq…brave W. Bush did it…any/all future problems in Iraq will be Obama’s fault. So we have a double arse day today. http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/01/inheriting_victory_in_iraq.asp
As Andrew Sullivan, a Republican who initially supported the Iraq war but has not now for some years, says:
The one thing to remember about the neocons: their shamelessness is their only means of survival. And amnesia – constant, disciplined, carefully organized amnesia. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/when-will-the-1.html
The Brittle Hum of the Republic 