A Bomb hits Fort Bragg

Putsch, never a gifted speaker, entered tonight’s speech with a daunting task. He had to staunch the hemorrhaging public trust in his Iraq policy. He had to convince that public that Iraq was worth it, that there was a solid goal for victory, and a sense for when and how that victory might be achieved.

He couldn’t mention WMDs, or torture, or the Downing Street memo. Which left him with only one approach: the claim that the quagmire in Iraq somehow fights the war on terror.

So of course, that’s precisely what he did. “We either deal with this terrorism and extremism abroad, or it comes to us.” 

He used the words “terror”, “terrorists” or “terrorism” 34 times in the half hour speech – more than once a minute. 

The speech was completely formulaic: simple concepts, repeated five or six times. If you repeat the same sort of sentences over and over, some people will believe them. It was an approach that worked will for Josef Goebbels through 1944, and it has worked for Putsch through 2005.

So we heard, once again, about how 9/11 led to invading Iraq, and that if we didn’t fight terrorists in Iraq, we would have to fight them here, and that only by making Iraq a beacon of peace and democracy could we bring freedom to the middle east. The ‘insurgents’ were followers of Osama bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, and Saddam Hussein, and “They fight because they know their hateful ideology is at stake.” He mentioned at one point that it was important to defeat them because they would lose their sponsors if they lost. When Putsch leaves office, maybe he can get a job as programing director for PBS. 

He maintained his peculiar conceit that thousands upon thousands of “terrorists” from all over the Islamic world had congregated in Iraq to fight the Americans. He didn’t explain why a diffuse collection of underground paramilitary groups, many of whom have no use for Sunnis, would want to face a superior military force face on, instead of the time-honored tactic of “hitting ‘em where they ain’t.” Oh, wait. That’s right. They’ve got a “hateful ideology” to promote. And he stepped on the assertion, made just two weeks ago by Senior Iraqi military officer Major General Joseph Taluto, that the insurgents captured were “99.9% Iraqis”. 

Aside from needing to scare the piss out of Americans with the terrorism bogeyman, Putsch has another reason why he needs to identify the “insurgency” as outside instigators. If they aren’t Islamic terrorists, then they are Iraqis who are fighting invaders in their own land. A Resistance. And even the most patriotic of Americans, the most vehement of chickenhawks, are loath to envision America as being an oppressor against a home Resistance. 

Especially when that’s exactly what the case is.

He condemned the savagry and viciousness of Resistance attacks on civilian populations, while tactfully neglecting to mention how he ordered Fallujah to be flattened, or the 21,000 air sorties flown against Iraq prior to the actual start of the war.

He talked about how the various goals of America had been met, and when he ran short, he simply invented some. For instance, he spoke about how one goal was to have “free and democratic” elections in Iraq no later than January 2005. He neglected to mention that this was an IRAQI goal, formulated in October 2004, and the US fought it tooth and nail. He mentioned that the US handed sovereignty over on time (and indeed, exactly one year ago) but forgot to mention that the public ceremonies scheduled for July 1st were scrapped, and that the turnover was signed in the middle of the night, and just a half-hour later, the American viceroy was on a plane, bugging out of the country as fast as he could.

He praised the rebuilding of Iraq, a noble and vast enterprise that has made Halliburton stockholders rich behind their wildest dreams. Just the day before the speech, the Pentagon had issued a report that essentially said that Halliburton had ripped them off to the tune of $1.4 billion in the “rebuilding” of Iraq. 

He mentioned at one point that he invaded Iraq to prevent it from turning into another Afghanistan, a statement made more interesting because it was a de facto admission that Iraq was not in the hands of Islamic terrorists at the time of the invasion. That he mentioned Afghanistan at all was interesting, since just the day before, The Scotsman, Scotland’s main newspaper, had reported that Putsch had been on the phone to Tony Blair, asking him to keep thousands of British troops sequestered in Iraq who had been scheduled to leave, because America would need thousands more, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the Americans feared that Afghanistan was breaking down into a civil war, much like Iraq already had.

He mentioned, a couple of times, that he had said in March 2003 that the fight would be long and difficult. That was more times than he had mentioned at the time (once) and this time, the warning didn’t come amid a chorus from the administration about how Iraqis would greet victorious American troops with rose petals and hosannas, or how easy it would be to wrap up hostilities once Iraq was secured.

There’s a Nixonian term for Putsch’s one use of the warning that it would be long and difficult: “plausible deniability.” He said it then simply in case everything went pear shaped in Iraq, and of course, everything has. So he’s using it now to try and cover his ass.

Speaking of which, one example now was his promise to listen to the commanders in the field, and “if they ask me for more troops, they will get them.” Remember that he said that. Plausible deniability. He wants to be able to say he gave us fair warning.

The American people seem to have lost their ability to assimilate simple platitudes, repeated over and over, a form of imprinting. It’s unlikely that many will believe his reassurances that things will improve in Iraq, and that a noble challenge was being met. Many, listening tonight, waited in vain to hear about WMDs, the Downing Street Memo, Halliburton corruption, or a timetable for bugging out. And all the flag waving in the world couldn’t hide that.

It wasn’t until after the speech, delivered to a Fort Bragg, North Carolina audience of service men and women, that a commentator pointed out something that showed just how flat this speech fell. During the half-hour he spoke, and despite all the audience-fucking lines about “our brave troops” and “bringing freedom to the world” he was interrupted by applause exactly ONCE. A military audience, supposedly his remaining bastion of support, and even they couldn’t work up any fake enthusiasm for the drivel he was serving them.

The speech, like the Iraq policy itself, was a failure.

It’s time to bring the troops home. It’s time to impeach Putsch. It’s time to restore freedom and democracy in America, and then America will be in a position, once again, to promote it honestly around the world, without having to fight Resistance movements.

“We are prevailing.” Those military people were so unenthused that I forgot it was a live speech.