Muddying the Water, part 2

A documentary called No End in Sight was a winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival [more info and an interview with the director can be found here]. To be honest, I have not seen it, but I recently read about it in The Nation. This film helps us recognize that we have to start having a real discussion about the Iraq Conflict.

The conservative muddying tactic has done wonders to obfuscate the real impact of the Iraq Conflict. Imagine that each pertinent piece of information that could lead to a discussion is represented by a colored thread. These threads are all tied to an object at one end and the other is free and lying on the floor. There are a rainbow assortment of colors, though many of them repeat or are similar shades. Got it?

Now imagine that the American people and the media look at these threads and begin matching them by color: reds together, blues together, yellows together, etc.: but before they can get very far, the president’s press secretary, Tony Snow, takes those threads out of your hands and says “that’s not how it goes; it goes like this” and proceeds to match up random colors. You say “I don’t see it” and he says “that’s because you’re stupid; leave it to the experts.”

So now you’re confused. You want to trust Uncle Tony, but you still don’t get it. So then you think about arranging them according to a rainbow or the color spectrum. Maybe that’s how its supposed to go. This time, the president himself comes out and pulls the strings away from you and says “silly normal person, you just don’t understand” and proceeds to match up random colors again.

What this documentary does is a few things: it points out that very few people in the administration were really on board with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz: they couldn’t see how the random colors connected either. Unfortunately they went along with it.

Secondly, it points out that the original state department plans were for !) a quick strike, 2) to overwhelm the military, and 3) then leave. The usual MO would fall into place with the U.S. appointing a new dictator. That’s where the administration changed it all with disasterous results.

It was the original leaders on the ground, representing the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) that had the pre-war planning implemented and were well on their way toward completing the U.S. mission in Iraq. It wasn’t a perfect plan: they actually supported the looting of museums, for instance: but it had a timetable. The neocons removed ORHA and replaced it with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which proceeded to demolish Iraqi infrastructure, including removing the 400,000 Baathists from the army, which meant that we actually created the insurgency.

Is it becoming clearer that those random collecting of threads in my image was intentional?

What I like about what is revealed in this new documentary is that it outlines precisely how criminal this administration is. It doesn’t focus on the president’s immorality: devotion to criminalizing, torturing, and killing people; his desperate need for complete control and unquestioned authority; his denial of American ideals such as health, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: it instead focuses on what can only be construed as deliberate negligence. Its genius is in indicting the president on abandoning a winning strategy crafted by military experts for a hatchet-job crafted by politicians. This is not only reprehensible, but it is criminal and impeachable.

With all of those aforementioned threads, there are so many strands for us to bind together. How about these batches:

He’s a liar.

• His lies encouraged the nation to participate in a criminal act.
• He conspired to commit mass murder.

He’s incompetent.

• His placing of the CPA in charge of Iraq devastated the mission in Iraq.
• His intentions cripple our ability to act internationally.

He is a war criminal.

• By invading a foreign nation and targeting civilians, the president has made himself and his entire administration culpable for the breaking of those international laws that we had a hand in writing.

He is destroying the U.S. military.

• Extending overseas stays, the backdoor draft, and quick redeployments are breaking the military.
• All of the above reasons have devastated recruitment, making fewer new soldiers to replace the retiring ones.
• This makes the U.S. an easier target and simultaneously incapacitates our ability to help in humanitarian efforts (Darfur) or to catch Osama bin Laden.

Do I need to keep going?