A River Runs Through It

I, for one, am overjoyed that the Big Media attack poodles have latched on to a convenient anti-Bush meme to drive the newscycle.

The basic theme is that Bush’s unwillingness to admit errors in the Iraq catastrophe, and the fanatical effort his administration devotes to denying, evading, and obscuring the truth, are blatant, ludicrous, and quite possibly a disqualification for high office.

All well and good. And perfectly true.

But there is an institutional queasiness about giving anti-war voices their due and acknowledging that the Iraq war was not just a mistake — it was a dishonest mistake.

It was a dishonest mistake, knowingly concocted by the Bush administration, abetted in the most cowardly fashion by the media, and acquiesced to with lazy insouciance by the willfully ignorant American public.

And today that mistake has metastasized into an immense failure that has shattered tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives and set back America’s worldwide interests, credibility, and capabilities for perhaps a decade.

Grounds for impeachment, maybe even war crimes, and perhaps even demanding a little bit of soul searching by flagwaving Americans who taken for granted that our avowed good intentions excuse the most egregious crimes, especially when committed against an alien and unpopular group…

…Wait a minute!

Can’t let our national self esteem erode and get us caught up in that whole Hitler/Germany-type national guilt thing!

Which leads to the most ridiculous and self-serving coverage of the Duelfer report:

The proposition that Saddam, utterly bereft of WMDs, brought the invasion on himself by pretending that he actually had them.

A news angle pursued in thoughtful stemwinders in the New York Times and the Washington Post based on backgrounders with an “in-the-know” government official.

(Articles that evaporated from the NYT and WaPo sites before I was able to link to them: another sign that the full-body, daylong kowtow to administration spin has been replaced by a hurried, sidelong obeisance as the media rushes past the White House to pay its respects to its likely new patron, John Kerry.)

But…Hey!

I followed the run-up to Gulf War Deux with particularly attention, and I do not remember Saddam cackling maniacally on top of a pile of empty 55-gallon drums labeled “anthrax” and challenging us to “bring it on”.

I do remember…

…Iraq issuing a report to the UN documenting its lack of WMDs — a report the United States derided and dismissed…

…UN inspectors swarming over the country, gaining access to all of Iraq’s installations and Saddam’s palaces as they demanded, but finding, as Saddam said they would, nothing…

…and the US massing its forces on the Iraq border in apparent disregard of any WMD capabilities as Saddam desperately tried to defuse the confrontation with escalating concessions — not threats of an unconventional weapons defense.

Anybody remember Saddam claiming he had WMDs during the Bush administration? I’d like to hear it.

But rest assured.

My motivation is not to try to make America feel bad about itself, or regret the nasty avoidable disaster that somehow occurred in Iraq as a result of our colossal moral and political laziness.

After all, there’s no point in apologizing to Saddam and trying to give him back the country. I doubt he’d want it, in the shape it’s in.

My objective is to prevent George W. Bush from winning the upcoming election.

And recognizing the limits and fundamental contradictions Big Media’s currently unfavorable coverage of Bush may be crucial.

Because I worry about Karl Rove springing a Halloween surprise…Osama bin Laden.

Before we draw too much comfort from Kerry’s one week of positive mo, and the good things it seems to say about America’s willingness to recognize some hard truths and disregard some convenient, oft-repeated lies…

…let’s remember…

…while Bush daily reveals his utter unfitness to act as anything other than Marionette-in-Chief, a truer picture of the White House’s preternatural political abilities and the media’s spinelessness can probably be found in the CBS/Killian documents affair.

Thanks to the hardworking people at bluelemur.com , I am faced with the possibility that:

Karl Rove knew that the Killian documents were out there, and had probably seen them (after all, they were offered to Michael Moore - who says he passed on them - as well as Burkett).

From personal involvement, Rove probably knew that only photocopies remained, since the originals had been safely cleansed back when GWB began his political career in Texas.

He knew that a plausible forensic challenge to CBS’s copies of the documents, if promptly and properly orchestrated, would put CBS on the defensive and force the utterly damning admission that they could not produce the originals.

Yesterday, after the trap had been sprung, when Dan Rather’s disgrace was last month’s news and not even Kevin Drum wants to stick his nose in the TANG mess again, Rove belatedly released some more Bush military records demanded by the AP’s FOIA suit…

…including an unimpeachable document written a year before the purported Killian memos, containing the same suspect kerning and superscripting that supposedly discredited the CBS documents.

This is not the working of a Mayberry Machiavelli. This is the masterpiece of a rube Richelieu.

And I do not see Rove allowing his stumblebum champion fall on his face a few yards short of the finish line for want of some last minute skullduggery.

Maybe Bush doesn’t have Osama bin Laden on ice already, but Kerry better plan — and inoculate as if he has.

As in:

Otherwise, if Karl pops OBL out of some convenient spider-hole come Halloween, the media and American people will fall over themselves to credit Bush for his belated, botched police work that should have been completed two years ago.

And content ourselves with the idea that a win over OBL cancels out failure in Iraq.

Because we want our crimes in Iraq to be outbalanced, excused, and, in essence, forgiven by Osama bin Laden’s.

We want to believe there’s nothing wrong with American empire, if it’s executed efficiently and with confident, crowd-pleasing panache against remote, unattractive people, and sugarcoated with assertions of our good intentions, vital national interests, and understandable anxieties…

...while ignoring the immense human cost.

We refuse to see the red river that runs through our country, now brimming with the blood of Iraq. It runs through our history, divides our people, and cuts us off from the love of truth, democracy, and freedom that once made our country great — and could make it great again.

And if it gets too deep…

…there’s no going back.

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.