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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The clock ticks for
thee By Tom Engelhardt
while its legislators are planning
to take a two-month summer "vacation"; a State
Department report on terrorism just released shows
a rise of 25% in terrorist attacks globally, and
45% of these attacks were in Iraq; 80% of Iraqis
oppose the US presence in their country; 64% of
Americans now want a timetable for a 2008
withdrawal; and the president's approval rating
fell to its
lowest
point, 28%, in the most recent Harris poll, which
had Vice President Dick Cheney at a similarly
record-setting 25%.
During this grueling,
destructive downward spiral through the very gates
of hell, whose end is not faintly in sight, the
administration's war words and imagery have,
unsurprisingly, undergone continual change as
well. In the course of these last years, the
"turning points", "tipping points", "milestones"
and "landmarks" on the road to Iraqi democracy and
freedom have turned into modest marks on
surveyor's yardsticks ("benchmarks"), not one of
which can be met by the woeful Iraqi government of
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The "magic
hour light" of May 2003 has disappeared, along
with those glorious photos from the deck of the
carrier. The sort of descriptions you see today,
as in a recent David Ignatius column in the
Washington Post, sound more like this:
"Republicans voice the bitterness and frustration
of people chained to the hull of a sinking ship."
(The USS George W Bush, undoubtedly.) Oh, and the
president and what's left of his tattered
administration have stopped filming on a Top
Gun-style movie set and seem now to be intent on
remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
This White House has plunged Iraq and the
world into the geopolitical equivalent of a
blood-and-gore exploitation film that simply won't
end. Call that "Mission Accomplished"!
The mission continues (2003)
Just the other day, with the fourth
anniversary of the Top Gun speech looming, deputy
White House press secretary Dana Perino was
questioned at a press briefing yet again about
that infamous banner and "major combat operations"
being at an end. Here is part of the exchange:
Ms Perino: ... I think
that if you only take the one line, that the end
of combat operations - major combat operations,
that's true, but the president also -
Q: Yes, but the banner is
[a] consideration, as well.
Ms
Perino: Okay, well ... And we have
explained it many times. And you know what? I
have a feeling I'm just on the losing end of
this battle because the left has decided to
believe what they want to believe, which is that
the president was saying that the war was over
and the troops were coming home. That's not what
he said, and I just told you specifically what
he said, and I encourage people to read the
whole speech. And that ship ...USS America [sic]
Lincoln had been deployed for well over its
stated period ... they were coming home. And it
was the ship that - that['s] mission was
accomplished. And the president never said
"mission accomplished" in the speech ...
Actually, Perino isn't wrong on
"mission accomplished" - and not just in the
literal sense either. It's well worth taking up
her suggestion, in fact, and rereading that
speech, though in order to do so you have to
travel a vast distance, as if through some
Star-Trekian wormhole into an alternate universe.
You have to reach across the chasm of Bush
administration disasters - from Kabul and Baghdad
to New Orleans and Walter Read Medical Center - to
another moment, another mood in the United States.
If you do, perhaps the first thing you'll note
about that magic-hour speech is its globally
messianic and militarized nature.
The
president, for instance, congratulated the
returning sailors and airmen in this over-the-top
way: "All of you - all in this generation of our
military - have taken up the highest calling of
history." It's the sort of line that brings to
mind one of the president's favorite hymns, A
Charge to Keep: To serve the present age
My calling to fulfill O may it all my
powers engage To do my master's will!
It also brings to mind Bush's
post-September 11, 2001 slip of the tongue when he
spoke of his beloved "war" as: "This crusade, this
war on terrorism."
And what exactly was
that calling, the highest in history, for which
they were fighting? A president, just off the
plane ride of his dreams, was perfectly willing to
spell it out. It was nothing less - he announced
from the deck of a ship whose planes had just
pummeled Saddam Hussein's Iraq - than "the peace
of the world". And the "peace" the president
had in mind wouldn't be some namby-pamby
cooperative endeavor. It would be an armed demand
of the rest of the world. After all, the invasion
Bush had launched just weeks before hadn't been an
ordinary military operation, a simple superpower
"cakewalk" over a pathetic force hollowed out by
years of war and fierce economic sanctions.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called, was
something "the world had not seen before".
Talk about awesome! "You have shown the
world," the president assured the Abraham Lincoln
crew, "the skill and the might of the American
armed forces" - the likes of which, the power of
which, it was clear, had never been witnessed on
the face of this planet in all of history from all
the empires that ever were.
Invoking the
American-manufactured image of Saddam's falling
statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, Bush waxed
enthusiastic, perhaps imagining Biblical idols
dropping before the one true God: "In the images
of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival
of a new era." A new era! You can feel that
messianic exclamation point embedded in the spirit
of the claim. And it wouldn't for a
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