[Anyone] Talking to Walls?

[Thos Myers]

Has He Started Talking to the Walls?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 03 December 2006

It turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard
Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate
demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to
Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior
of a president who isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely
untethered from reality. It's not that he can't handle the truth about
Iraq. He doesn't know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only
2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in
chief who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the
combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World
War II.

But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's
"unity government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern.
(In Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a
nation "in the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime
minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president
nonetheless declared him "the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This
came only a day after The Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr.
Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki
either "ignorant of what is going on" in his own country or disingenuous
or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters
what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the
right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq
is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom
Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived
predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is
far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that we've been helping to
"stand up" at hideous cost all these years. If we're not going to take him
out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him
directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows
few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr's existence.

In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell
wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new
language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of
Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic
impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is
severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone
one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same
goes for his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition
when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr,
a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about
two words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago
into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That
we were fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that
wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in
retreating from English as we once knew it.

It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the
public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that
the "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat
itself).

In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to
such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of
Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how
much the word "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America
after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever
you want to label what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our
freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or
is the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth
and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why,
when the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before
the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient
lie to further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from
the real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has
anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet
Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in
his press conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by
sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory.
Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson
did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a
sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as
Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand
why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted
to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members
of Congress. Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied,
"I'd like to get them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as
acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the
ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver
bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special
envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be
made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the
minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the
Decider's decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that
he is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home.
American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than
they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White
House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to
think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld
and the mission of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24,
around Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.





"All we are saying is give peace a chance."
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