A friend of mine who was in the Navy told me that the flight suit that George Bush wore at his slightly premature ”mission accomplished” visit a few miles off the coast of San Diego is called a “poopy-suit.” Just in case you need an explanation about the suit ? , it is a special suit worn by pilots just in case they are way up in the air in their airplanes that don’t happen to have a toilet handy. You can imagine the rest. Well, he’s coming back, to San Diego and is in town as of this posting, sans poopy suit this time.
Georgie, at least metaphorically, soiled himself with his “mission accomplished.” And now he returns to the scene of what has turned out to be many misleading and hollow pronouncements. He will—AGAIN!—appear before a vetted crowd of military to make sure that he gets an enthusiastic approval. Chicken George, as I like to refer to him these days, does not face his adversaries (the deft PR hand of Karl Rove at work). Last time they turned the aircraft carrier around so that at would appear it was far out to sea and not just off the coast of San Diego. (Maybe they should issue us all poopy suits.)
This is apparently what Bush means by “staying the course,” his self-deluding mantra that he is actually going to bring political stability to Iraq that lasts much longer than it takes to launder his poopy-suit. The language is already being fashioned that will cover the necessity to begin bringing some of the troops home. Bush’s columnist toady David Brooks floated one the other night, something to the effect that “well, we shouldn’t expect that democracy in Iraq will be like our democracy; it will reflect their culture.” OK folks, ready for an Islamic “democracy”?
This type of stuff has been central to the Bush administration’s PR approach to this war (or “struggle” — isn’t that what kampf means?) Change the wording and it changes the reality. Really? Is your son or daughter any less dead or maimed in a struggle than a war? Change the rationale from destroying weapons of mass destruction, to capturing a brutal dictator, to installing democracy, to “fighting terrorism over there rather than in the streets of America,” whatever, so long as he gets to keep spending the $8million per hour on this ridiculous military adventure that is costing us even more in international reputation.
So how much will television viewers believe that those rounds of applause for “staying the course” elicited from a carefully selected audience in San Diego reflect the mood of the nation? The numbers are close to what they were when public support for America’s last military misadventure went in the tank, and Cindy Sheehan is a grieving mother outside of Bush’s, not Jane Fonda at an anti-aircraft emplacement outside Hanoi.
When the approval numbers hit one-third that means that even some Red State “useful idiots” are beginning to “get it.” They are beginning to get the idea that the shifting PR actually means that Bush and his Neo-Cons went into this thing without any real clear plan of how to get out of it. The rhetoric actually reflects the reality of this exercise in ad hoc -ery. The terrible thought is beginning to enter those minds that “we could lose this one, too.”
Lost in the dust of Iraq is that even Chicken George’s father didn’t get out of there cleanly. He let the Shiites in the south think that he would back them up if they rose up against Saddam. Then the old man sat by and watched them get slaughtered. ? So how do you fashion and exit strategy to guard against being more vulnerable as the troops are drawn down and look victorious with the insurgents nipping at your heels as you are on your way out? George’s latest, and indefinite, strategy is “ as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”
Will they stand up? Saddam won’t be around to punish them, but those damned “insurgents” in their flip-flops and gallibbyas , and their kamikazi tactics—they weren’t part of this non-plan for withdrawal. And with a constitution that is looking more a bad pre-nuptial agreement for aménage a trois the mess left behind may be even worse than the one that daddy Bush left behind. Meanwhile, we’re getting booted out of our base in Uzbekistan as things seem to be unraveling in Afghanistan.
It’s enough to make a guy mess his poop suit.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.30.2005)
? Not about “mission accomplished,” which must really be news to the 1,500 or so dead service people and the thousands of wounded, not to mention un-counted dead Iraqis.
? Shades of Vietnam and what happened to about 30,000 ARVIN when we helicoptered out of there.