a Potemkin Village - New York Times
The New York Times

December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

It Takes a Potemkin Village
By
FRANK RICH

WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village
is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must
instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern
what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As
the
administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks
further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt
Goebbels,
but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.

The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much
about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as
reports
from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat
operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single
elegant
banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest
White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian
mitosis
over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which
Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.

And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite
the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself -
Americans
believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission
Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval
Academy pep talk,
released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the
president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution
still
have larger constituencies in America than that.

Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated
nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than
complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant
reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next
week's Iraqi
elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American
Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating
the readiness
of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was
primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked
by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as
"completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime
minister,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own
military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.

But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except
that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that
the
subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches
and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves.
What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was
the subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated motive for
the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National
Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt
turkey
the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two
Thanksgivings ago.

As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an
unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's inception in
"early
2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a
few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at
whitehouse.gov
could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What
turned up was the name of the document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a
Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council
only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war
itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy
for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than
six
months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army,
who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never
seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last month.

In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the
same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in
the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor,
the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat
news
articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into
Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm's way are desperate for
Arabic
translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al
Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we
know
that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent
since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam's
W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help
disseminate happy talk to his own country's press to further the illusion
that
the war is being won.

The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a
Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the
Iraqis, whose
intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by
them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush's speeches.
Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times
revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started
stonewalling from
a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and
Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We
don't have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group
articles themselves are factual.

The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for various
Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though the 30-year-old
prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea
Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain
facts
are proving not at all elusive.

Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at
least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and
under
phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey
"was a founder and active participant in Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising
and networking operation" - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web
site - and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business
address
identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail
of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding
procedures
for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from
"Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan
valiantly
continue their search for "the facts," what we know so far can safely be
filed under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."

The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see
it's failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the
disastrous
Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its
array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's
brother),
so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it
shells out to cronies for fake news.

Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was
less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy
sexual-harassment
suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500
identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in
2003, the
fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional
scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled
quickly,
as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja
on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told
Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen's loved
ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent
to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.

Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does.
Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under
Brownie
three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland
security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her
clarifications
about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors
before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's
latest
Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and
Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.

This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released
last week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area where things are
going
relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his
rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the
Bush
culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer
believing.

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The New York Times Company
Posted by Miriam V.