A Tribute to President Bush: Ode to an Idiot
Each year of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq has been symbolized by at least one major fib about the war. That Iraq is now calm or more stable is only the latest in a series of such big whoppers. The fifth anniversary of Bush’s invasion of Iraq thankfully will be the last over which he presides. The most famous of the falsehoods about the war were those that were employed by the president and his close advisers to justify our initial invasion of Iraq. But each year since the U.S. troops barreled toward Baghdad in March 2003 has been marked by propaganda campaigns no less deceitful. Here are five of the big lies from the Bush administration that have attempted to shape our perceptions of the Iraq war:
Year One. The big lie that characterized the first year was that the rapidly increasing violence in Iraq was nothing out of the ordinary. The social turmoil kicked off by the invasion was repeatedly denied by Bush officials. Nevertheless, the first year of the war saw the rise of a Sunni Arab guerrilla movement that repeatedly struck at U.S. troops and at members and leaders of the Shiite-dominated Interim Governing Council that had been appointed by the American government. Bush was so little concerned by the challenge of an insurgency that he cavalierly taunted the Sunni Arab guerrillas with a rousing, “Bring ‘em on!” regardless of whether it might end up recklessly endangering the lives of our U.S. soldiers. And so, the guerrillas then indeed brought it on.
Year Two. The falsehood for this year was that Iraq was becoming a shining model of democracy under America’s caring nurturance. The truth was that Bush had planned to impose on Iraq what he called “caucus-based” elections, in which the electorate would be restricted to the provincial and some municipal council members who were backed by Bush-related institutions. That plan was thwarted by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who demanded one-person, one-vote open elections, and brought tens of thousands of protesters out into the streets. The elections were deeply flawed, both with regard to execution and outcome. The U.S. campaign against Fallujah in November 2004, marked by more bad-tempered rhetoric from Bush, angered Sunni Arabs who feared that the U.S. strategy favored Shiite ascendancy and led to their boycotting the elections. The electoral system chosen by the United Nations and the U.S. would guarantee that if they boycotted, they would be without representation in parliament. Candidates could not campaign, and voters did not know for which individuals they were voting.
Year Three. The Bush administration blamed almost everything that was going wrong on one shadowy figure: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bush set the mood for Year 3 with a speech at Fort Bragg in July 2005, in which he stated that, “The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11… if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi…and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden.” The previous week, Bush had said that the U.S. was in Iraq “because we were attacked.” Zarqawi was the perfect plot device for an administration who wanted to perpetuate the falsehood that the Iraq war was directly connected with Sept. 11 and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, security analysts had discerned that there were in fact 50 distinct Sunni Arab guerrilla cells in Iraq. Some were Baathists and some were Arab nationalists; some were Salafi Sunni fundamentalists while others were tribally based. To have attributed so many attacks all over central, western and northern Iraq to a single entity suggested an enormous, centrally directed organization in Iraq called “al-Qaida.” But there was never any evidence for such a conclusion, and after Zarqawi was killed during a U.S. airstrike in May 2006, the insurgent violence continued with utterly no change in pattern.
Year Four. As large parts of Iraq descended into hell, Bush’s big lie consisted of denying that the country had fallen into civil war at all. In late February 2006, Sunni guerrillas blew up the golden-domed Askariya shrine of the Shiites in Samarra. In the aftermath, the Shiites, who had shown some restraint until then, targeted the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and its backcountry for ethnic cleansing. After May 2006, the death toll of victims of sectarian violence rose at times to an official figure of 2,500 or more per month, fluctuating around that level for the subsequent year. Baghdad police had to form a new unit, the Corpse Patrol, to collect dozens of bodies every morning from the streets of the capital. On Sept. 1, 2006, Sunni guerrillas slaughtered 34 Asian and Iraqi Shiite pilgrims passing near Ramadi on their way to the Shiite holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad. In an address the very next day Bush said, “Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war.” Bush continued with his delusional spin: “The people of Baghdad are seeing their security forces in the streets, dealing a blow to criminals and terrorists.”
Year 5. This past year has been one of rapid troop escalation in Iraq, or the big “Surge.” The big lie now is that Iraq is calm, that the Surge has worked and that victory is within reach. One of the strategies involved disarming the Sunni Arabs of Baghdad, who in 2003 had constituted nearly half of the capital’s inhabitants. This had enormously disastrous consequences. The Shiite militias took advantage of the Sunnis’ helplessness to invade their neighborhoods at night, kill some as an object lesson, and chase the Sunnis out. Thousands of Baghdad residents were ethnically cleansed in the course of 2007, during the Surge, and some two-thirds of the more than 1.2 million Iraqi refugees who ended up in Syria were Sunni Arabs. Baghdad, a symbol of past Arab glory and of the Iraqi nation, became at least 75 percent Shiite, perhaps more.
The frequency and deadliness of attacks and bombings increased in February and March 2008, after having fallen in January. However, in the first 10 days of March, there were 39 deaths a day from political violence, up from 29 a day in February, and 20 in January. On March 17th, a horrific bombing in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala killed 52 and wounded 75, ruining the timing of Vice President Cheney’s and Sen. McCain’s visit to Iraq, one that had been planned in order to make a further declaration of victory. Nevertheless, a complicit U.S. media was speaking of “calm” and “a lull” in Iraq violence, even while the destructive bombs were going off in Baghdad, and Turkey’s incursion was resulting in over a hundred deaths.
Read more from Salon here.
Bush on the Iraq War’s 5th Anniversary: It is Noble and Just
So just in the nick of time, while we’re on the subject of President Bush’s total and delusional idiocy, here is a melodic tribute to the dim-witted president:
A Tribute to Bush: Ode to a Dim-Wit
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