Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.George Orwell
1948
You can't blame drowning men for grasping at straws (after all, what's the alternative?) so I probably shouldn't be too hard on the Bush Fedayeen for snatching up the Pentagon's latest propaganda "proof" that it is, despite all appearances, winning the war in Iraq.
But if they're going to grab straws, you'd think they would at least reach for fresh dry ones -- instead of the same old soggy lies that have already failed them (and us) again and again.
- The dreaded terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is actually a weeny and poser with a taste for American footwear.
- The mighty Iraqi security forces have the enemy on the run.
- Al Qaeda in Iraq is having trouble recruiting local fighters because "the people of Iraq do not support its cause."
And yes, according to Centcom, that last bit is a direct quote, or rather, a translation of one. Al Qaeda operatives, it seems, like to refer to themselves in the third person singular and freely admit to each other, in writing, that their cause is both hopeless and unpopular.
For the pro-regime bitter enders (ours) this is a forlorn flash of light in a sky that otherwise seems to be rapidly darkening towards Das Gotterdammerung -- or a Democratic Congress, which is even worse. So of course they've all been talking up the story, in much the same way that ultra conservatives of another era and a different country once talked up rumors of miracle weapons. Here's Powerlie's Assrocket, for example:
Put it all together: al Qaeda in Iraq is failing. It has little military strength, and the Iraqi people "do not support its cause." It has succeeded in one arena only: the American media.
And it's true, the verminous Fifth Columnists of the MSM generally did ignore Centcom's big scoop. There is, however, a good reason for this -- one that doesn't necessarily reflect a desire to stab the Reich in the back. Even gullible journalists can and sometimes do learn from experience, and in this case they have plenty of experience to draw on.
Compare, for example, the tortured syntax and startling pessimism (particularly for a bunch of religious fanatics who believe they're fighting for Allah) of Centcom's most recent production with this passage:
Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases."By God, this is suffocation!" the writer says.But there is still time to mount a war against the Shiites . . . before the turnover of sovereignty in June. After that, the writer suggests, any attacks on Shiites will be viewed as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that will find little support among the people . . . because . . . "the sons of this land will be the authority," the letter states. "This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts."
That's lifted from a New York Times description of the last big Centcom propaganda leak, an alleged letter from al-Zarqawi to his pals in Afghanistan, allegedly captured in early 2004. The dubious origins of that earlier letter -- including two completely contradictory stories about how and where it was captured -- are examined here and here.
Two years (and 2,000 U.S. casualties) after the fact, does that "By God, this is suffocation" line sound even close to plausible? Remember, this was only a few weeks before an eruption of violence that took Centcom entirely by surprise and turned Fallujah into a jihadist stronghold and most of the Sunni Triangle into a free-fire zone. So what happened to all that "intelligence information" which was supposedly increasing "day by day?" Did the dog eat it?
After three years of non-stop lies, including the reported capture of approximately 158,000 of Zarqawi's closest lieutenants, it's gotten to the point where even some of the Pentagon's biggest fans (not counting the morticians back home) have stopped buying the bullshit -- and are even starting to call bullshit, in print. The Washington Post's Tom Ricks, for example, blew the whistle on the Zarqawi disinformation campaign last month:
Other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
If you go back and look at Ricks' reporting from earlier in the war, you'll hardly find the conservative stereotype of the gullible, liberal anti-war tool (like the David Janssen character in The Green Berets.) Instead you'll find a staunchly pro-military tool who faithfully transcribed every "light at the end of the tunnel" or "almost over the hump" comment made by every officer he encountered. If even Ricks isn't buying this stuff any more, you know the product stinks.
And it really does. You'd think that for the money the Pentagon is shelling out for this crap, they could come up with something more believable than Salafist jihadis who praise democracy and refer to themselves (again, according to Centcom, in a direct quote) as: "groups of assassins without any organized military capabilities." I mean, please.
Then again, the stuff's apparently good enough to keep the diehards chattering away about final victory, even though the biggest problem facing Operation Iraqi Fiasco really isn't al-Zarqawi and his band of religious lunatics, but the fact that everybody in the freaking country now hates or mistrusts us (and our British satellite troops) almost as much as they hate and mistrust each other. Claiming that Zarqawi is just a little old lady in tennis shoes doesn't do a thing to change that equation, even if it's true. But if it helps the crazies in Right Blogostan self medicate, I guess it at least serves some useful social purpose.
But there is a larger -- and more important -- story here than the neocons pulling another con job, this time on their own deluded followers. If Ricks and Filkins and reporters like them were originally inclined to give Centcom every benefit of the doubt (and they were) it's a reflection of one of the lessons the military thought it had learned from Vietnam: Don't lie to the media. Control them, yes, restrict access to the battle zone, yes, feed them reams of "Control Room" spin and carefully pre-masticated facts, yes. But don't flat out lie to them, because in the end they will find out, and from that point on you can kiss your credibility -- and your ability to influence the coverage -- good bye.
By and large, the military held to that credo over the next thirty years, and regained most of the credibility and respect - not to mention fawning media coverage -- it had squandered away in Vietnam. And that respect and that credibility proved extremely valuable assets in the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan and in the opening phases of Gulf War II.
However, Donald Rumsfeld, in his infinite wisdom, clearly decided long ago that telling the truth (or at least not lying) was one Vietnam lesson the Pentagon needed to unlearn. As I've noted before (back when Ricks and Filkins were still slurping up the Kool Aid) Rummy made it clear early on that he and his cohorts reserve the right to lie (ah, I mean, to engage in strategic information campaigns) if they believe it is in the national interest. Naturally, this also means if it's in their interests.
This may even be the smart way to play it, given the ineptness and corruption of our modern Big Media. Who cares if they find out they've been lied to? They don't seem to care, so why the hell should the liars?
But Ricks' decision to go public with his suspicions (even if only in the limited way allowed by the conventions of "straight" reporting) shows there are still some big-time journalists on the receiving end of all that mendacity who do care. And, unfortunately for the Bush Fedayeen, the American people are currently listening to them, rather than the conservative agitprop machine. At least for the moment.
Of course, it may be that conning the simple minded -- i.e., holding the base -- is all the Pentagon propaganda technicians are trying to accomplish here, or all they think reasonable to shoot for. If the Powerlie bundists are clutching at straws, so, too, is Donald Rumsfeld. It seems one of the hallmarks of a failing authoritarian regime is its ability to go on fooling itself, and its followers, long after the rest of the world has stopped even paying attention.
Just ask Comical Ali. He can tell you how that goes.