If another 10 Marines had not been killed Thursday outside Fallujah, this would have been the week to note that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s preening gamecock persona finally has realized its comedic potential.
Ever since Sept. 11, Rummy — as he is affectionately known to his dwindling band of admirers — has alternately cowed and wowed large segments of the Pentagon press corps with an exaggerated blend of sarcasm and strut straight off the music hall stage. On Tuesday, for example, he stood in front of the briefing room microphone and — with a straight face — cited Iraq’s new free and independent news media as one of the US occupation’s success stories.
“The country...has a free media,” he said. “It’s a relief valve. ...There’s a hundred-plus papers.” The punch line to this inside joke is that some substantial number of those papers turn out to be on the secretary’s payroll.
As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, while the US State Department and Agency for International Development have spent millions of dollars training Iraqi journalists and encouraging the establishment of an independent news media to distribute their work, the Pentagon has shelled out millions more to bribe the same reporters and broadcasters to run phony news stories produced by the US military and distributed by a private American contractor, the Washington-based Lincoln Group. Its head, conveniently enough, is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer.
On Friday, the Senate Armed Services Committee went into closed session to hear testimony on exactly what the Pentagon was up to in Iraq. Even White House spokesman Scott McClellan expressed a kind of convoluted concern over the program’s implications. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch — the US military’s top spokesman in Baghdad — defended the program because the Al-Qaeda murder gang’s local thug-in-chief, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, “is lying to the Iraqi people” through the media. According to Lynch, the United States doesn’t lie. “We don’t need to lie. We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact.”
Well, maybe not entirely.
The New York Times, for example, got a look at a story the Lincoln Group prepared this week for placement in Azzaman, one of Baghdad’s leading “independent” newspapers. It warned Iraqis not to heed the opinions of foreign journalists because the “Western press and frequently those self-styled ‘objective’ observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation.”
Maj. Gen. Lynch notwithstanding, that’s hardly the Joe Friday school of reporting.
Beyond the sheer perversity of claiming credit for establishing a democratic Iraq while systematically manipulating its electorate’s information and corrupting its ostensibly free press, there are a couple of other sinister implications here.
One has to do with what will happen in Iraq after the inevitable US withdrawal. As retired Gen. William E. Odom, who headed the National Security Agency under President Reagan, recently said, leaving “a pro-American liberal regime in place” is “just impossible ....Imposing a liberal constitutional order in Iraq would be to accomplish something that has never been done before. Of all the world’s political cultures, an Arab-Muslim one may be the most resistant to such a change. ...Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military’s institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation.”
Subverting the Iraqi press and corrupting its editors and reporters puts Baghdad’s civil society just that much further behind the curve and makes it all the more likely that a new Saddam Hussein will rise from the rubble of occupation.
Then there’s the issue of whether the US government’s covert propaganda can be quarantined offshore, as it was in the depth of the Cold War, when the CIA bought journalists and subsidized anti-Communist publications across Europe. In the era of the Internet, when online commentators and publications routinely link to sources around the world, how long will it be before the Lincoln Group’s fabrications insinuate themselves into the columns of the American press?
When propaganda is laundered through cyberspace, informational blowback is a real possibility. The Pentagon’s subversion of Iraqi democracy may just as easily become subversion of our own.
At the end of the day, there will be a strong tendency to write off this whole planted-story episode as nothing more than forgivable overzealousness under pressure by the commanders on the scene or perhaps the isolated misconduct of rogue contractors. Neither explanation will suffice, since this shabby affair is all of a piece with the administration’s conduct of the entire Iraqi conflict.
It began with the willful misrepresentation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs and then proceeded through the cover-up and justification of torture and abuse of prisoners, to the deliberate suppression of information concerning Iraqi civilian casualties that now appear to number in the tens of thousands. Add to all that the continued exaggerations and wishful thinking that passes for official appraisals of the situation on the ground and a suspicion emerges that brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s defense of circumstantial evidence. There are situations that lend it decisive weight, he argued, “as when a trout is found in the milk.”
This week, David Halberstam — whose monumental reportorial exegesis of the American debacle in Southeast Asia, “The Best and the Brightest,” grows more pertinent by the day — pointed out that the real peril attendant on the construction of these informational Potemkin villages is that the US officials who build them ultimately come to believe their own fabrications. It happened in Vietnam, and these days, any sober soul who listens to President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Rumsfeld speak about Iraq is bound to feel that we’ve all been down this road before.
“It’s a culture of being loose with the truth,” a senior US defense official told a Knight Ridder correspondent this week. “We’d better stop it or we’re going to end up like (we) did in Vietnam.”
Maybe we already have.
As each act of official self-deception compounds on another exercise in deliberate deceit, it seems more and more likely that whichever reeking bag of misfortune the wretched Iraqis are left holding by this turn in their unhappy history, Americans will recall George W. Bush’s military misadventure in the Middle East as the war to make the world safe for mendacity.
— Rutten writes about the media for the Times.
