Just Above Sunset

Entries from May 2007

Iraq - Not Vietnam at All, But Actually Korea

May 31, 2007 · 2 Comments

The story had been has been bubbling under the surface for a few days – two separate reports of a visit a number of Texas-based supporters paid to President Bush recently. The president’s version of the story goes like this - “a bunch of our buddies from Texas” visited the White House and asked him a fawning question, “Man, how come you’re still standing?” He gave them the hero-answer - “I’m inspired by doing this job. I believe strongly in the decisions I have made. I firmly believe that we are responding to this initial challenge of the 21st century in proper fashion.”

 

The Nelson Report gives a quite different version of the story - some “big money players up from Texas” managed to “get out exactly one question” before Bush went off on “an extended whine, a rant, actually, about [how] no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK, etc.”

 

People do see things differently.  The odd thing is, via Think Progress, there seems to be a third version of the story.  Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer in the Dallas Morning News reports that friends of the president from Texas were “shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated, ‘I am the president!’ He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of ‘our country’s destiny.’”

 

That’s odd, particularly when coupled with an odd detail in this - he now makes all his friends call him “Mr. President.”  It is not clear that applies to his wife or his parents.

Some might find all this a tad scary.  Others, the crew at Fox News, might find it all heartening – something to do with that authoritarian cult of personality thing they’ve got going over there.

 

The business may be catching, as we find the Republican senator from South Carolina, getting all defensive and kind of losing it –

 

During a luncheon speech to 100 constituents in Spartanburg, DeMint also took issue with the now widespread belief that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, saying the executed Iraqi dictator had “stockpiles of chemical weapons” that still exist.

 

DeMint devoted most of his comments to the current immigration debate in the Senate. But he spoke about the war when a woman in the audience stood and asked him how long U.S. troops will remain in Iraq.

 

“Al-Qaida knows that we’ve got a lot of wimps in Congress,” DeMint said. “I believe a lot of the casualties can be laid at the feet of all the talk in Congress about how we’ve got to get out, we’ve got to cut and run.”

 

Jon Soltz over at VoteVets.org, one of our vets from multiple tours of Iraq, gets ticked off –

 

Wimps are people like Senator DeMint who don’t want to ask the tough questions or face facts, which is why he’s idiotically clinging to the idea that there were WMD in Iraq.  Any stockpiles of weapons found in Iraq were useless - either inert or rusted and unusable because of their age.  Senator DeMint is living in some sort of twisted fantasy land, where democracy, not failed policy, is responsible for too many American lives lost in Iraq, and where bad intelligence is miraculously valid.  He should click his ruby slippers three times and join us back in the land of reality, or resign from the Senate.

 

Well, when people feel they are being attacked they do say the oddest things.  You have invested your entire self-image in something that has gone in the weeds, for good reasons that now anyone can see, and when people point to the reality of how it’s just not working out, and actually never will, and actually never could, you naturally lash out.

 

Or you simply refuse to click your ruby slippers three times and join the rest of us back in the land of reality. You work on other ways of thinking about what went sour, as Reuters reports here –

 

President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.

 

The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

 

Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.

 

“The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability,” Snow told reporters.

 

Huh? Josh Marshall is not impressed –

 

It is hard not to take this as another example that the White House is seriously out of touch with both history and reality when it comes to Iraq.

 

Let’s run through a few differences. First, Korea is an ethnically and culturally homogenous state. Iraq, not a culturally or ethnically homogenous state. And needless to say, that has been a point of some real difficulty. Second, Korea a democracy? Well, yes, for about fifteen years. Without going into all the details, South Korea was a military dictatorship for most of the Cold War.

 

A deeper acquaintance with the last half century of Korean history would suggest that a) a fifty year occupation, b) lack of democracy and c) a hostile neighbor were deeply intertwined. Remove B or C and you probably don’t have A, certainly no A if you lose both B and C.

 

The more telling dissimilarity is the distinction between frontline troops and troops for stability. At least notionally (and largely this was true) US troops have been in South Korea to ward off an invasion from the North. US troops aren’t in Iraq to ward off any invasion. Invasion from who? Saudi Arabia? Syria?

 

No, US troops are in Iraq for domestic security, in so many words, to protect it from itself, or to ensure the continued existence of an elected, pro-US government.

That tells you that the US military presence in Iraq will never be as relatively bloodless as the US military presence in Korea since it has no external threat it’s counterbalancing against. In a sense that the US deployment in Korea has never quite been, it is a sustained foreign military occupation.

 

Well, you don’t have to think of it that way, of course. The idea, though, does have the smell of desperation.

 

See also Fred Kaplan, rather exasperated – “It’s no news that George W. Bush and his handlers don’t know much about history, but their latest stab at pretending otherwise is among their most ludicrous.”

 

In fact he does quite believe this –

 

Let’s set aside for a moment whether the comparison is valid - much more on that to come - and ask why on earth Bush would make it. Huge numbers of U.S. troops have been in South Korea for 57 years. Do Bush and Snow really mean to suggest that U.S. troops will still be stationed in Iraq in the year 2060 and beyond?

 

Well, yes – maybe. But here’s the deal –

 

In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops - at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula - have remained on guard at the world’s most heavily armed border.

 

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren’t in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation’s outset), and to keep a “low-grade” sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.

 

In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.

 

To sum up, we intervened in South Korea as a response to an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to contain Communist aggression. We intervened in Iraq as the instigator of an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to expand unilateral American power. We remained in South Korea to protect a solid (if, for many years, authoritarian) government from another border incursion. We are remaining in Iraq to bolster a flimsy government and stave off a violent social implosion.

 

Other than that, they’re just alike. But Kaplan points out that’s madness –

 

In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow “a Korean model” - if the word model means anything - is absurd.

 

Then there is the theater of the absurd, White House spokesman Tony Snow’s daily White House press conference –

 

Q: So you’re not suggesting that U.S. troops would be there for over 50 years in a –

 

Snow: No, no, I’m not. I don’t know. It is an unanswerable question, but I’m not making that suggestion.

 

Q: You’re not suggesting that there’s a parallel between the Korean model today and the Iraqi model today, in terms of U.S. force posture?

 

Snow: No, what I’m saying is you get to a point in the future where you want it to be a purely support role. But no, of course, we’re in active combat …

 

Q: [W]hen you talk about this Korean model, would that kick in whether things are going poorly after the surge or going well after the surge? I mean, do you have to maintain a stability of some sort?

 

Snow: … I’m not going to get into any of the details of those sorts of things.

 

But he does, his tap shoes in flames –

 

Here is - what the president means by [the Korean model] is that, at some point, you want to get to a situation in which the Iraqis have the capability to go ahead and handle the fundamental matters of security. You have the United States there in … an “over-the-horizon” support role, so that if you need the ability to react quickly to major challenges or crises, you can be there, but the Iraqis are conducting the lion’s share of the business - as we have in South Korea.

 

But that’s flat-out wrong. Since the 1953 armistice, our troops actually have been on the front lines in South Korea, not “over the horizon.”  They will they begin to shift into a “support” role and redeploy south of Seoul – next year. No one pointed that out.

 

But then, Kaplan notes, something else is happening here –

 

There is one way that the two wars are similar: The Korean War in the early 1950s, like the Iraq War today, was deeply unpopular among the American people. (Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election partly because he promised to “go to Korea” and end the war - a pledge that he made good on.) Now, whether due to hindsight or forgetfulness, the Korean War doesn’t seem so bad. By likening that war to the present war, Bush and Snow are trying to convince us that, in the future, the Iraq war won’t seem so bad either.

 

This is the implicit message of all the historical analogies Bush & Co. have palmed off in recent years - that, bad as things might seem, they’re no worse than similar events seemed in the past.

 

And you can make history be whatever you want – it’s a matter of perspective.

 

You remember that when the “insurgency” in Iraq first started getting way out of hand, the president his top advisers claimed similar guerrilla groups tried to disrupt the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II.  It was repeated endlessly on the Fox News opinion – it was so sad no one studies history these days. It turned out to be pure crap – there were no long years of our soldiers getting picked off by snipers and Germans hiding in the hedges blowing up jeeps. No one remembered that – no veterans had stories, there were no news clips. They dropped that line.  It was worth a try.

 

As things dragged on comparisons with the Philippines came next.  That’s now a thriving democracy. See? When people pointed out that took forty years, and we did our share of really nasty stuff, they dropped that line.

 

Kaplan notes the third historical comparison –

 

When Iraq’s constitutional convention was mired in conflict, Bush and his top Cabinet members noted that our own forefathers took eight years to get from the ramshackle Articles of Confederation to the Constitution we now cherish (ignoring the vast social, cultural, and political differences between federalist America and contemporary Iraq).

 

They dropped that too. It was a bit silly.  But still the president is still on that Harry Truman thing.  Truman’s Cold War policy was amazingly unpopular, and now everyone sees he was right all along. So there!  On the other hand Truman came up with a few things the Current Occupant would find just stupid – NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods agreement – because they have to do with working with others in a sort community of nations.  So you don’t bring up that sort of thing.

 

Kaplan isn’t nice –

 

To President Bush, history is not a complex record of the past, to be studied intensively for lessons. It’s a grab bag of myths and half-truths, to be dredged for political effect - a device that provides rhetorical cover, and allows evasion of responsibility, in the face of gross and obvious failure.

 

Well, no one wants to face that. Better to dazzle everyone with false history.  No one does study history these days.  You can rely on the public’s willful, intense and proud shallowness.  And if you believe it all yourself, so much the better – for after all, if we understood reality as it really is we’d be immobilized. Delusion is useful.  Heck, it makes life possible.

 

Of course, there was some official disapproval (Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Democrat, California) –

 

The White House announcement that they view South Korea as the model for a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq is further evidence of how dangerously out of touch with reality this administration is.

 

On a strictly historical level, the comparison is comical. A high school student could tell you that there are virtually no similarities between the Korea and Iraq. The administration’s inept attempts to come up with tortured historical analogies to try to justify a failed policy should be another reminder just how little credibility they have on the issue.

 

The frightening truth is that there are obviously people within the Bush administration who believe that it is a good idea to occupy Iraq military on a permanent basis, which is why we have fought so hard in Congress to establish a clear policy to prevent permanent military bases in Iraq.

 

The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want an end to the occupation, and for the White House to suggest that it will continue for another fifty years, or perhaps permanently, only fuels the insurgency and further endangers our troops.

 

The American people are also calling for an end to the occupation, and the fact that the administration has responded by saying they think the occupation should be permanent just underlines not only how out of touch they are, but how critical it is for Congress to intervene to bring an end to this failed policy.

 

Well yes, you want to enflame the insurgency, you do say things like this. It’s not only wrong-headed and ignorant, it makes matters worse.  Why do it?

 

There’s a lively discussion of all this on at Josh Marshall’s site, and one of his readers offers this –

 

I find it hard to believe that people are actually taking Bush’s Korean analogy seriously with respect to Iraq. And, so far, the Democratic Congress seems to be giving him a pass on it. The timing was good, of course. He caught Congress with barbeque on their collective chin.

 

As you noticed, there are some remarkable differences between Korea and Iraq, not the least of which is the fact that there never was a Korean resistance to our occupation of the South or to the Soviet occupation of the North, following the liberation, division and occupation of Korea after World War II. The struggle for unification between the South and the North came down to a rather traditional war and a test of military power between the US on one side and the Soviets and China on the other.

 

The proper analogy for Iraq is still Vietnam. While the government we created in South Korea was functional and able to control its population, the government we have created in Iraq, like the government we created in South Vietnam, has been largely irrelevant. In Iraq, Shiites and Sunnis are fighting us, our al Maliki government, the Kurds, each other and themselves in a last-man-standing free-for-all. While it’s tempting to try to find some method to the madness of the last few years, you won’t find it in a 50-year plan to control the oil supply of the Middle East. That’s a pipe dream that didn’t survive the occupation. By floating the Korean occupation as an analogy for Iraq, Bush has created one more leaky vessel to cling to as his presidency is swept into the backwaters of history. We may be in Afghanistan 50 years from now, but we won’t be in Iraq.

 

Marshall comments –

 

To a degree I agree the whole ‘control the natural resources of the region’ idea didn’t survive ‘first contact’, to paraphrase the US Army line about military planning. But denial is a useful thing. And a lot of the flailing about of recent years, actually most of it, has been an effort to find some way to sustain the original vision.

 

But Duncan Black has the last word –

 

Why Do We Stay In Iraq?

 

The answer is unknowable because there isn’t one. There are a variety of powerful actors who have different motives. It’s as true, if not more true, for the continued occupation as it was for the initial invasion.

 

George Bush started the war because Saddam tried to killed his Dad and because he wanted to prance around on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit. He later got stubborn about the whole thing when those mean Democrats started criticizing him, and he began to buy into the transformational rhetoric due to his increasing messianic bent. And, now, it’s about his “legacy.”

 

Dick Cheney started the war because of his insatiable lust for the black stuff. Dick Cheney keeps us in Iraq because of his insatiable lust for the black stuff.

Don Rumsfeld went to war to prove that he could achieve any military result with 3 marines, an armed aerial drone, and his left pinky. He stayed in Iraq because George Bush told him to and because he still needed to prove his awesomeness.

 

AEI and Viceroy Jerry went to war because they were excited about their new libertarian paradise laboratory.

 

Paul Wolfowitz had grand dreams about transforming the Middle East into who knows what.

 

Tom Friedman and others went to war because they have the mentality of 5 years olds and they thought that the smartest thing we could do was whip out our giant schlong and wave it around for awhile. Tom Friedman and others stay in Iraq because they think that if they don’t keep popping cialis (”If your occupation lasts longer than 6 months…”) the world will notice our little tiny shriveled up thingy.

 

Karl Rove went to war so his boy could prance on the aircraft carrier and win re-election. He stays because leaving Iraq will anger wingnuttia.

 

Lots of other people stay in Iraq just because they don’t like to admit they’re wrong. Their egos are more important anything.

 

The sensible liberals at Brookings were so stupid they thought Saddam was a threat. They were the stupidest people of all, because that was about the only thing which had nothing to do with why we invaded Iraq. They stay in Iraq because they’re unable to accept responsibility for their actions.

 

Democrats went to war because they were scared of losing their elections. They stay there because they’re scared of losing elections.

 

Ultimately it’s all centered around oil, the endless needs of the military industrial complex, and various other financial interests masquerading as ideology. But there isn’t one reason, just a grand harmonic convergence of wingnuttery.

 

So we stay.  Deal with it, just don’t make up crap.

 

On the other hand, it is now June, and it may be all over but the shouting.  Just look up what was said on 30 November last year –

 

AMMAN, Jordan - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Thursday that his country’s forces would be able to assume security command by June 2007 - which could allow the United States to start withdrawing its troops.

 

“I cannot answer on behalf of the U.S. administration but I can tell you that from our side our forces will be ready by June 2007,” Maliki told ABC television after meeting President Bush on Thursday in Jordan.

 

Cool. Done. Fixed.

 

Categories: Couldn't Be So · Reality and all that...

Our Reputation Precedes Us

May 30, 2007 · 1 Comment

Does a nation’s reputation matter? A nation with a reputation for playing fair and respecting the views of others – insofar as a nation can without ignoring its own national interests – has a far easier time in this world. It can be trusted. The eight years of the Clinton administration, while filled with conflict, were like that.  We may not have been feared as much as now, and were, even then, disliked on many levels – but we were, by and large, trusted. We were trying to do the right thing internationally, and sometimes screwing up, or passing on matters where we might have made a difference (as with the Rwanda genocide) – but we weren’t see as the bad guys.  That gave us leeway, almost in the nautical sense – room to maneuver.

 

Now world opinion has changed, and we made sure it did.  We act unilaterally.  Rejecting the Kyoto treaty, pulling out of the International Criminal Court (fine for others but we don’t want to be subject to it), revoking the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the war in Iraq itself – it all adds up. We got this “bad boy” reputation – to match the president’s personality and the vice president’s inclinations. The British government joined us in most of this, by shrugging at it all no matter that the population there was aghast.  No other major governments were with us, however.  But we didn’t care – Rumsfeld scoffed at the “Old Europe” that he said really didn’t matter anymore.  France, our prickly ally since the late eighteenth century and the butt of many a joke, became our enemy – at least publically (there was always much cooperative antiterrorism work going on in the background, as Bill O’Reilly fulminated and we ordered our Freedom Fries).

 

In short, we openly declared we didn’t much care what the world thought about what we did, or even if they joined us in our war. We were doing what was right, so screw them all.

 

That of course had wonderful implications domestically – large enough blocks of voters responded to the idea that no one could tell us what to do, or what might be more prudent and sensible.  It spoke to the teenager in all of us.  It kept the administration in power.  Call it atavistic or immature but it doesn’t matter – it was powerful. It was just a matter of reading the mood of the American public after the 2001 attacks.

 

Everyone knows the usual warnings about throwing away one’s reputation in a fit of angry rebelliousness, and here are three –

 

“To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless.” [Lat., Negligere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti.] ~ Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), De Officiis (1, 28)

 

“Reputation is character minus what you’ve been caught doing.” ~ Michael Iapoce

 

“A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.” ~ Joseph Hall

 

Some say we should go about repairing our previous reputation – that might be useful now that our fit of pique has passed. There are a lot of problems to be solved, and much to rebuild in Iraq and across the Middle East. A little help would be good right about now – if no troops, some cash, and if not cash, at least some cooperation.

 

But that’s unlikely to come. Consider what the outgoing Tony Blair said in the Sunday Times of London on Memorial Day weekend –

 

I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.

 

When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.

 

What’s more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us?

 

Why? Glenn Greenwald suggests this –

 

In general, human beings do not appreciate it when foreign armies invade their nation, shatter its infrastructure, drop bombs throughout the country, kill tens of thousands of civilians, unleash anarchy and chaos, and then proceed to occupy the country with a force of 150,000 foreign soldiers. And that is true even if a genuine monster like Saddam Hussein is removed from power and killed in the process.

 

No matter how well-intentioned the invaders might think they are - indeed, no matter how well-intentioned the invaders actually might be - that behavior is going to engender anger and resentment among the invaded populace, not to mention the rest of the world, and that resentment is going to increase as the brutality and duration (and ineptitude) of the occupation increases.

 

And all of that is to say nothing of the extremely precarious notion that Muslims perceive that the aim of the invasion is to bequeath to the Muslim world what George Bush calls “the Almighty God’s gift to every man, woman and child”: freedom and democracy.

 

Well, we have engendered vast anger and resentment around the world, and Greenwald sees why, even if Blair does not –

 

Our closest Middle Eastern allies are some of the most repressive tyrants on the planet, while we direct some of our most intense hostility to governments far more democratic. And we demonstrate infinitely less interest in regions around the world which lack resources we want and need and/or lack countries which are of great importance to key domestic political groups. In light of these facts, how receptive are Muslims going to be to the claim that we are the bearers of “God’s gift” to the Muslim world?

 

It is one thing to argue that we invaded Iraq in order to strengthen U.S. security. But the idea that people are going to be grateful when we invade various countries and subdue resistance with extreme violence and brutality is dangerously absurd. Echoes of the same mindset are evident now as various warmongers insinuate that the Iranian population is eagerly awaiting our “liberating” campaign of bombing and regime change.

 

The fact that Tony Blair - after four years in Iraq of extreme violence, chaos, disruption, brutality, death squads, Abu Ghraib, and a total breakdown of the most basic societal functions and norms - can ask: “Why should anyone feel angry about us?,” is a potent indication of just how self-absorbed, out-of-touch, and detached from reality the prime authors of this war have been.

 

There is that famous quote from Frank Barron - “Never take a person’s dignity: it is worth everything to them, and nothing to you.” Oh well.

 

Sidney Blumenthal, the former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, is of course, one of those who longs for the good old days – before “9/11 changed everything” as they say. He made some remarks at a conference, “From Terror to Security,” held by the New York University Center on Law and Security in Florence, Italy, on May 26, in which he argues, in short, America is Not Bush. 

 

Most of the world is not so sure of that any longer, but Blumenthal makes the argument nonetheless, offering for his subhead – “The damage the president has done to our country’s reputation can be rebuilt - by those who uphold our Founding Fathers’ ideals.”

 

Some of what he contends goes like this –

 

When President Kennedy in his inaugural address spoke of “a long twilight struggle,” he signaled that the Cold War was the challenge and framework defining U.S. foreign policy, as it already had been through previous Republican and Democratic presidencies. But President Bush’s conception of a global war on terror is not the Cold War. There is no consensus around its assumptions. On the contrary, its premises have been refuted by their own applications. The collision of Bush’s fantasies with reality has stripped them bare.

 

And Blumenthal does lists of what is just not so –

 

·         The current challenge is not a struggle against a totalitarian foe.

·         It is not, as Bush has said, “the ideological struggle of our time.”

·         It is not an ideological war.

·         It is not a battle against an enemy called “Islamofascism” - a confected category that conflates Bush’s idea of war not only with the Cold War but also with World War II.

·         Most important, it is not a struggle for national survival against an existential threat. Jihadism and its use of terror are, of course, a dangerous threat, but they do not, and cannot, destroy the United States as the Soviet Union could do.

 

But these assumptions, Blumenthal claims, lead to false choices - law enforcement and the administration’s “war paradigm.” Of course law enforcement and military force are rather essential these days. But then so is diplomacy, including public diplomacy.  Did 9/11 change everything, and war it is, or can the other tools be used without, at best, ridicule, and at worst, suggestions of treason?  No, not these days.

 

And this is rather obvious –

 

Among the many consequences of the idea that we are in a war for survival have been the distortion, corruption and subversion of American law and the U.S. legal system, from the abrogation of the Geneva Convention against torture to the suspension of habeas corpus. The corruption is an aspect of a general hostility to and undermining of not only the law but also our senior military, our intelligence community, the Foreign Service, and international institutions including the United Nations and the World Bank.

 

The contention here is that we have somehow romanticized the conflict we say we have on our hands, and that “has obscured the real one and the ability to deal with it.”

 

Try this –

 

Projecting the illusion of omnipotence has fueled the illusion of jihadism. The more boastful the claim of our virtue, the more vaunted the jihadists’ claim of holy war; the greater the claim of our limitless power, the greater the credence of jihadists’ universalism.

 

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Bush declared after 9/11, a statement that underlines the one made by Osama bin Laden in 1995, long before Bush spoke on the subject. “This is an open war up to the end, until victory,” said bin Laden. Mimicking the terrorist leader’s rhetoric does nothing but lend credence to bin Laden and the jihadists.

 

And diplomacy isn’t pointless –

 

Public diplomacy is not about meeting and greeting, working the rope line, shaking hands or kissing babies. It is not a political campaign. And it is not about convincing Muslim peoples that we too are monotheistic. Public diplomacy rests on policy, and to begin with, the policy must be sound. It’s the policy, stupid.

 

And we’ve screwed that real good.  But we can recover –

 

One characteristic of the Bush administration’s false premises, and perhaps the one that has most damaged the nation’s reputation, is that its idea of America and its notion of American exceptionalism - Messianic and Manichaean - is the only idea of America. But there is another idea of the country, which began even before the country was a nation, before America became the United States, a nation under law. John Winthrop said (and has been cited by Republican and Democratic presidents since) that we must be “as a city upon a hill.” The next sentence is: “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

 

So what do we do now?  There’s not much here.  The piece is a bit of a sermon – long on principle and short on specifics.

 

But it’s not as if the administration now, after a long period of defiant ill-temper, has started to care about our international reputation. Perhaps they always did, but had the concept wrong.  Fred Kaplan argues that the administration has always seemed to believe that “public relations is a synonym for diplomacy” – and therein lies the problem. He examines that in Bush’s Failed Campaign to Rebrand America – and it’s amusing in a sad sort of way.

 

The item centers on a State Department official named Price Floyd, who resigned in protest last March. Floyd was director of media relations at the State Department – and that in itself is on odd job. He’s held diplomatic posts for seventeen years, beginning in the administration of the president’s father.  But he got fed up and walked away from it all.  In the May 25 edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (he is from Forth Worth originally), he explains why he quit – he just got tired of trying to convince journalists, here and around the world, “that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words.”  That’s the nub of it.

 

He says it started right after the 2001 attacks – the State Department was tasked with “an unprecedented effort” to explain our foreign policy to all of us here in America and everyone else around the world.  It was a big deal – his office arranged almost seven thousand interviews, half of them with international media.  On any given day, “senior officials” were doing four or five interviews.  It just didn’t work – “poll after poll revealed rising animosity toward America.”

 

So why didn’t it work?  He knows why.  It doesn’t matter a whole lot what you say – words don’t matter, actions do. “What we don’t have here is a failure to communicate.” The problem was obvious - our actions, “which speak the loudest of all.”

 

So we rejected Kyoto treaty, and the International Criminal Court, and revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.  Then came Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo was always there.  “These actions have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. This is the policy we have been ’selling’ through our actions.”

 

So what to you get?  Anything you “say” is ignored or dismissed as “meaningless U.S. propaganda.”

 

No kidding.

 

The Kaplan article recounts a phone interview on Wednesday, May 30 – Kaplan called the guy at the Center for a New Security, a Washington think tank, where he is now director of external relations. Kaplan wanted elaboration. What led Floyd to abandon his career at the State Department, the only place he said he’d ever wanted to work? Kaplan got it.

 

Try this –

 

“I’d be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House,” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘We need to get our people out there on more media.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not so much the packaging, it’s the substance that’s giving us trouble.’”

 

He recounted a phone conversation with a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad who wanted Floyd and his colleagues to sell the media more “good-news stories” about the war in Iraq. “I said, ‘Fine, tell me a good-news story, I want good-news stories, too.’ There was a silence on the other end of the line,” he recalled. “It was like you could hear crickets chirping.”

 

Floyd would tell his colleagues that the administration’s message was drifting dangerously out of synch with reality. He was finding it increasingly difficult to place officials’ op-ed pieces in serious newspapers. Few broadcast media, other than Christian radio networks, wanted to interview the department’s experts, dismissing what they had to say as “more blah-blah from the State Department.”

 

After a few recitations of these warnings, his bosses, as he put it, “started telling me to shut up. They didn’t want to hear this.”

 

So he walked away from the job of organizing the recovery of our national reputation.  He says you cannot do that with just words.  They seemed to think he was some kind of slacker, or someone who didn’t really understand his job, or was trying to hide the fact he just didn’t have the necessary skills.  He thought they were nuts – no amount of skill would fix things.

 

People joke about “putting lipstick on the pig” with the implicit giggle that people are generally so dumb they’ll think the pig is young Audrey Hepburn or something. Say it’s super or “new and improved” or some such thing and people will buy anything – they’re that dumb and that easily led. Floyd seemed to have had different experiences in the world – he must have run into some skeptical and half-intelligent foreigners and Americans in all those years at State. He seemed to doubt that you could spin most people. That old advice – “dazzle ‘em with bullshit” – seemed pointless to him.  Most people have pretty good “crap detectors” – at least in his experience.

 

Yes, you just thought of Karl Rove, who built the younger Bush’s empire on the opposite premise. They call him a genius, or used to.  Floyd didn’t belong in the administration.  We’re talking two different universes here.

 

Kaplan adds this –

 

The problem, of course, went - and still goes - well beyond the State Department bureaucracy. Ever since 9/11, President Bush and his top aides have acted as if they needed only to “rebrand” America - devise a slogan or set of images - in order to clear up hostile foreigners’ misunderstandings about our nature and intentions.

 

It’s crude marketing, and there are three key names to remember – Charlotte Beers, Margaret Tutwiler and Karen Hughes.

 

Kaplan remembers –

 

Shortly after the terrorist attacks, Bush hired Charlotte Beers, a prominent advertising executive, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. She spent nearly a year producing a slick documentary, which preview audiences greeted with howls and catcalls, before hightailing it back to Madison Avenue. After Beers came Margaret Tutwiler, James Baker’s can-do press aide during the presidency of Bush’s father, who, it turned out, couldn’t do this job, either. Then came Karen Hughes, Bush Jr.’s own former spin-master, who embarked on two disastrous trips to the Middle East early on in her tenure and has lain low ever since.

 

The problem wasn’t Beers, Tutwiler, or Hughes personally. Rather, it was the assumption that led Bush to believe that they were qualified for the job to begin with - the assumption that public relations is a synonym for diplomacy.

 

Kaplan also points back to Santa Monica –

 

Back in 2004, the RAND Corporation issued a report that anticipated the main point Floyd would later make from the inside, equally in vain - that the key factor in public diplomacy is not what the U.S. government says but rather what it does.

 

“Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism,” the report concluded. Many foreigners understand us just fine; they simply don’t like what they see. It’s “some U.S. policies [that] have been, are, and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism.”

 

And he points back to North Carolina –

 

One crucial aspect of this problem antedates George W. Bush’s presidency. It goes back to the mid-1990s, when Jesse Helms, then the xenophobic Republican chairman of the Senate foreign-relations committee, gutted the U.S. Information Agency and swept its tattered remnants into a dark, dank corner of the State Department.

 

In its Cold War heyday, the USIA had been a fairly independent agency mandated with blaring the principles of American culture and democracy across the world. It sponsored jazz concerts and radio broadcasts, speaking tours, public libraries filled with classic political documents. The operation was so independent from policy-makers that, during the 1960s and early ’70s, some American scholars sent out on USIA-sponsored speaking tours openly opposed the Vietnam War.

 

The agency’s relative independence - and its staff’s attunement to foreign cultures and languages - conveyed an attractive image of America. But it was also what annoyed Sen. Helms, and so he dismantled the whole operation.

 

Price Floyd liked that.  In the interview he said he himself traces the decline of America’s standing in the world to that moment –

 

Back then, the USIA transmitted American values - and this was separate from selling American policy. The two aren’t separated now. There’s no entity that makes it possible to separate them. So, if you disagree with our policy, which is easy to do now, then you hate America, too.

 

Kaplan says that in the interview and in his Star-Telegram op-ed piece, Floyd called for something like a restoration of the old USIA, at least in spirit - a return to public diplomacy (as opposed to public relations), a sustained demonstration that America is about more than bombs and soldiers, a realignment of America’s words and its actions.

 

That’s not going to happen, but it’s pretty to think so. We still think we can dazzle them. They’re walking away.

 

We not only learned nothing from Vietnam – we learned nothing from the Ford Edsel. “E-Day” was September 4, 1957, and The Edsel Show was broadcast on October 13 – the car was supposed to be all new and quite wonderful and all that stuff. The Edsel, however, shared its bodywork with other Ford models – and the crap detectors were working. The next day it got its nickname – the Ford sucking a lemon (just look at one).

 

Same deal. We’ve got lemon on our hands.

 

Categories: Couldn't Be So · Foreign Policy · Political Posturing · Reality and all that...