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2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA US captivated in the theater of
war By Ira Chernus
A
week has passed since President George W Bush
announced that US troops will stay in Iraq in "a
security engagement that extends beyond my
presidency". Last spring, those words would have
evoked howls of protest from Democratic leaders.
Now, scarcely a peep.
While the world was
on August vacation, Republican and Democratic
leaders moved toward a compromise. The outlines are
clear enough: some US troops
will start leaving Iraq soon, but tens of
thousands will stay on indefinitely with a
permanent mission of providing something called
"overwatch". This open-ended "Korea model" seems
to be a done deal. About the only issue left to
debate is how fast the "transition" should happen,
how quickly the troops that aren't staying should
be "redeployed".
Peace activists who
despair of the spineless Democrats should keep in
mind that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have
compromised, too. In his most recent speech, just
six years and two days after he became the United
States' tough-as-nails "war president", the
Decider announced that he has decided to do what
many Democrats and the peace movement have been
demanding - begin getting troops out of Iraq.
Yes, the numbers will be so pitifully
small that many already claim they are
meaningless. Nonetheless, it's a major shift in
Bush's narrative. And that counts for something
all too real, because the debate is hardly about
policy any more. It's mainly about the stories we
tell about policy - and about "America". Perhaps
it always was.
Every war is bound to turn
into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic
spectacle - the more mythic the better. It's no
coincidence that the military refers to a battle
zone as a "theater". Political "battles" are
high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most
gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a
debate about the math of minimalist "drawdown" -
how many troops should leave and how soon - is
hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to
fuel public passions. And yet the two major
parties have to conjure up the illusion of a
profound, emotionally stirring difference between
them. So they turn a debate like the present one
about troop numbers and time frames into a contest
between larger competing narratives.
Last
spring, with Bush's "troop surge" plan seemingly
floundering, it looked as if the Democrats were
winning that contest. Then, over the summer, the
Bush administration began to catch up - and not
just by accident. According to the Washington
Post:
Ed Gillespie, the new presidential
counselor, organized daily conference calls at
7:45am and again late in the afternoon [among]
the White House, the Pentagon, the State
Department, and the US Embassy and military in
Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.
From the start of the Bush plan, the White House
communications office had been blitzing an
e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists,
lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers,
military groups and others with talking points
or rebuttals of criticism. Between January 10
and [early September], the office put out 94
such documents.
Call it a surge of
words on the home front. But mounting a publicity
blitz, no matter how well funded, is no guarantee
of success. You have to put on a show good enough
to sell tickets and elicit applause. So why did
the pro-war show draw a big enough audience (at
least among beleaguered Republicans) that many key
Democrats, frustrated by congressional voting math
and frightened for the 2008 electoral future,
began to wave the flag of compromise - and so few
Republican senators were willing to support even
the Democrats' halfway measures?
A war
president who can't win the war Part of
the answer is revealed in the most astounding
polling figure of recent weeks. A New York Times
poll asked, "[Whom] do you trust the most with
successfully resolving the war in Iraq?" In
response, only 5% of those polled gave the nod to
the Bush administration, just 21% to Congress, but
fully 68% - more than two out of three - plunked
for "the military".
Once again, the
top-rated show of the season is evidently that
all-time favorite, "The Military Saves the Day", a
sequel to the smash hit of the past several
seasons, "Support Our Troops". No wonder the White
House brought its hero and "surge" commander,
General David Petraeus, onstage for the final
scene in this act of a seemingly never-ending
drama. No wonder Bush used the general as cover
not only for continuing the war, but for making
his own shadowy compromises in his September 13
address to the nation (which, by the way, drew a
far smaller audience than his last major speech
introducing his "surge" plan, or "new way
forward", on January 10).
"General
Petraeus recommends that in December, we begin
transitioning to the next phase of our strategy,"
Bush said. "Our troops will focus on a more
limited set of tasks." It was as if, all of a
sudden, the newly four-starred general, and not
the president, were now the commander-in-chief.
For White House scriptwriters, there was
certainly another reason to give the general the
leading role in this scene from the
administration's home-front Iraq drama. He has
actually seen something of the reality of war.
Everyone knows that Bush (like Cheney and others
high in the current administration) studiously -
even notoriously - avoided the real theater of
battle. With his wartime credibility always
somewhat suspect, all Bush can offer is an
illusion spun out of dramatic words.
Bush
and his writers also made compromises in their
storyline. The ringing language of past years
about bringing "freedom" to Iraq and the Middle
East, though not completely absent, was far more
muted this time around. Instead of spreading good
tidings about a US mission to liberate the world,
the main theme of Bush's Petraeus speech was a
reprise of another close-to-home classic: "The
success of a free Iraq is critical to the security
of the United States." The post-September 11,
2001, narrative - defending America against those
who would destroy us - had again taken center
stage.
No facts are available to indicate
that the war in Iraq is making Americans safer, as
Petraeus himself admitted. So the president's
claim made no sense - not, that is, if you were
measuring his argument against facts or logic. But
don't fool yourself, it made fine sense as a good
old-fashioned American yarn: the band of brothers
righteously defending themselves against evildoers
who will annihilate us if we don't annihilate them
first.
There is, however, one crucial
piece of that old American yarn that Bush now has
no choice but to play down - the piece that says
the good guys always win, unconditionally. After
years of announcing that victory was at hand, or
at least claiming that he had a surefire strategy
for victory, he can no longer tell that part of
the story because no one will believe it anymore.
In his latest speech, the word "victory" - which
he once used 15 times in a single speech - was
missing in action, replaced by the far less
martial, so much less triumphant word "success".
The "Korea model", that more than
half-century of garrisoning the southern part of
that country after a stalemated war, lets us know
what "success" is supposed to mean: a government
(or a set of regional governments) in Iraq that
can provide safety for US troops on their
permanent bases and wherever they go throughout
the country.
But even that hard-to-imagine
outcome would be far too pallid a denouement to
look like victory to a US audience. In fact,
that's one big reason Bush's public support has
eroded enough to force him to make compromises.
He's a war president who can no longer promise
actually to win the war.
A test of
character A good plot raises the right
question, one that keeps people in the theater
because they care deeply about the answer. In the
battle of narratives, the Bush administration, no
matter how crippled, still knows what the right
question is.
When it comes to Iraq, in
recent months, Democratic scriptwriters have
indeed spotlighted a question: Can inept Iraqi
politicians succeed in getting their act together
when brave Americans give them the time to do so?
It's just not the right question from a
storytelling point of view. Few Americans really
care about the performance of a faction-torn
foreign government on the other side of the world.
The Bush administration's story might seem
to turn on a question with little more mobilizing
power: Can American troops succeed in reducing
violence in Iraq? But behind that question - and
General Petraeus's elaborate charts on the metrics
of violence in that
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