[Peace-discuss] Bush's failing war against reality

[Paul Patton]

 *Faith and Fraud *
  *by Jonathan Schell*

A fictitious picture of the world built up by the Bush Administration over
its five years in power is now going to pieces before our eyes. Great jagged
spikes of reality, like the crags of the iceberg that ripped open the
staterooms of the Titanic, are tearing into it on all sides. The
disrespected world of facts, an exacting master, is putting down this
governmental insurrection against its ineluctable laws.

The pivot is of course the war in Iraq, which in its origins and conduct was
and remains a colossal, blood-drenched fraud. But now a majority of the
public has caught on and wants the United States to withdraw. In addition, a
special counsel has reached directly into the White House and, for the first
time since 1875, indicted an official who works there: the Vice President's
chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who was trying to suppress the truth about the
war by punishing a truth-teller, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

But of course, the Administration's rebellion against the factual world has
gone far beyond the war. The government has been mobilized across the board
to erase or deride knowledge of everything from the largest problems now
requiring the world's attention--such as global warming and the spread of
weapons of mass destruction and their materials (while the Administration
ransacked Iraq in vain for them)--to the comparative minutiae of domestic
policy, such as the cost of prescription drugs, the extent of power-plant
pollution and malfeasance in the award of Pentagon contracts.

As the fantasy explodes, new aspects of the machinery of falsehood are being
brought into view. The willful, concerted, energetic tenacity of the defense
of fiction is notable. The twenty-two pages of Libby's indictment portray
the office of Vice President Cheney skillfully and relentlessly deploying
all its resources to protect the single false allegation that Iraq was
purchasing uranium in Niger before the war. Cheney and his team worked for
weeks to marshal the information and misinformation with which to smear
Wilson. Meetings were held to discuss just how to spread the dirt to
reporters. A misleading identification ("former Hill staffer") for the
designated smearer, Libby, was concocted.

Did the Administration know the truth and lie to others, so that "the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," as the head of
British intelligence put it contemporaneously? Or was it that Bush officials
"misled themselves.... And then they misled the world," as the United
Nations inspector at the time, Hans Blix, has recently said--in keeping with
the old principle of salesmanship that the most persuasive deceiver is a
self-deceiver? Or did the Administration, like an overzealous policeman who
believes someone is guilty and plants evidence on him to "prove" it, just
believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and, combining faith and
fraud, fix the facts to fit its belief? Whichever it was, the effort was
arduous and protracted. And the same can be said of other assaults on
factual truth and its tellers. For hiding the real world, with its powerful
capacity to pour forth oceans of new facts every day, is not an
inconsiderable task.

Perhaps that's why, in a more recent discovery about the Bush officials,
they turn out to have had a minimal interest in actually running things.
Many have noted that the Administration had no plan for running Iraq. But it
took the federal response, or lack of one, to Hurricane Katrina to show that
the same might be true of the Administration's approach to the United
States. In light of this new surmise, other puzzles melt away: a Clear Skies
Act that dirties the skies, a Social Security plan to address a financial
shortfall that deepened the problem and so forth. It has turned out that the
Republican Party, which has long seen government as "the problem," not "the
solution," is uninterested in governing. But if a "government" ceases to
govern, can we call it a government? If a "supermarket" sells no food, can
we call it a supermarket? We all keep referring to the "Bush
Administration," yet administering seems to be the last thing on its mind.

These disclosures bring a new question to the fore: If the Bush outfit is
not governing, what is it doing? The answer comes readily: It wishes to
acquire, increase and consolidate the power of the Republican Party. At home
the GOP is to become a "permanent majority for the future of this country,"
in the words of former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay, now also
indicted, and abroad the country would be the imperial ruler of the globe.

But if the manufacture of illusion is a shortcut to power, it is a poor
long-term strategy in a democracy--as long as the system still functions.
The dream of the one-power world may have expired in intractable Iraq, but
the dream of the one-party state at home is not yet dead. Bush's difficulty
is that his chief opposition is not the weak-kneed Democrats, unable to
mount effective opposition even to the Iraq War, but the neglected stuff of
the real world. What is currently "voting" against Bush, you might say, is
not so much the bloc of independents or security moms or any of the other
slices of the demographic pie that public opinion pollsters examine but the
molecules of carbon dioxide heating up the global air, the collapsed water
purification system of Iraq, the dollars fleeing our Treasury, the wages
emptying out of people's pockets.

The weekend following Libby's indictment, a surprising consensus emerged
among outside political observers in both parties: Bush should admit error
and hire new counselors who could "talk reality" to him, in the words of Ken
Duberstein, a chief of staff to Ronald Reagan. The White House quickly
brushed the advice aside. Through a spokesman, Bush declined the opportunity
to admit anything. And then, bright and early Monday morning, he nominated
right-wing Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, in a trumpet call to
rally his right-wing political army. As John Yoo, a right-wing former Bush
Administration Justice Department official put it, "With this nomination,
Bush is saying 'Bring it on!'" No one would talk reality to Bush. He would
fight the truth-tellers, and the truth they would tell him, to the end.

J*onathan Schell, The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, is the
Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of The
Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the
People<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805044574/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>(Metropolitan)
and A
Hole in the World<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256001/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>,
a compilation of his "Letter From Ground Zero" columns, which has just been
published by Nation Books. *
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20051106/8c3f6bc8/attachment.htm