Shut Up and Die

Comparing the Bush Administration's everything-is-just-peachy comments on Iraq to the daily mayhem we see from that war-torn country, one can come to the conclusion that there are apparently two Iraqs.

One exists in a world where American soldiers hand out candy to smiling and photogenic children, where the Iraqi people eagerly embrace a perpetual American occupation backing up a puppet government, where people look forward to standing in line as sitting ducks while waiting to vote for a candidate approved by Washington, where people are happy to forget all about their bombed-out homes and their relatives being scooped off the street and the risk of getting killed while going to the store.

The other exists in the real world, where American soldiers trying to secure an entire country cannot even secure a ten-mile stretch of roadway between the Green Zone and the Baghdad airport, where a homegrown insurgency grows more every day, where two fighters are recruited for every one killed, and where an estimated one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion began almost two years ago.

The myopia of President Bush and his inner circle gets more and more pronounced every day. Their method of dealing with bad news from Iraq may be a simple one -- just wish it all away -- but it does not exactly help the situation. Instead, they hide behind meaningless slogans ("Freedom is on the march!" "We're making progress!" and so on) whose only apparent purpose is to trick people who don't bother reading beyond the headlines into thinking everything is fine. One wonders if Bush et al believe their own nonsense.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the few first-term Cabinet secretaries not shown the door after the election, showed off his management style while visiting American soldiers in Kuwait yesterday. (Rumsfeld evidently does not believe his own propaganda, as he didn't go anywhere near the Iraqi border, leaving that for the suckers -- oops, soldiers -- who are fighting his war for him.) He asked for questions from the troops, getting the usual collection of softballs and sound bites.

But just once, he got an actual question, from a soldier who put him on the spot by asking, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?" As the mass of soldiers erupted in applause, Rumsfeld shot back, "You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

In other words, shut up, go back to the front lines, and get blown up for the greater glory of -- well, we're still figuring that part out. Anyway, we decided to fight this war on the cheap and we'll do it to the last drop of your blood.

If he said it during a war that was thrust upon us, where we were required to rush into the field or else, it would be one thing. But considering that this was very much a war of choice, and that Rumsfeld et al sneeringly rejected cautions from military professionals about the troops and resources needed, it was absolutely outrageous. And does anyone remember Bush's now forgotten campaign promise that the troops would have all the armor they needed?

It's like the old Groucho Marx line when he was caught with another woman and tried to deny the incredibly obvious: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Bush, Rumsfeld and their band of merry men are determined to take us through the looking-glass, where black is white, where up is down, and where an endless desert quagmire is a fabulous success. They're entitled to their delusions, but they can't make the rest of us go along with it.