Equally doomed is the second part of Bush's pro-war P.R. campaign, a paid TV propaganda blitz run by a group named Freedom's Watch, headed by former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer. The Freedom's Watch ads could be said to represent the reductio ad absurdum of War Mythology -- patriotism as emotional blackmail, jingoism with high production values. The ads -- there are four so far -- use Americans who suffered losses in the 9/11 attacks or in Iraq to bludgeon viewers into going along with Bush's doomed war, implicitly casting critics of that war as defeatists and near-traitors. Thus, an Iraq war veteran who lost a leg is shown saying, "Congress was right to vote to fight terrorism in Iraq and I re-enlisted after September 11 because I don't want my sons to see what I saw. I want them to be free and safe. I know what I lost. I also know that if we pull out now everything I've given and the sacrifices will mean nothing. They attacked us and they will again. They won't stop in Iraq. We are winning on the ground and making real progress. It's no time to quit. It's no time for politics."
Will this blatant appeal to the War Myth work? It has in the past, and the Bush administration seems confident it will again. "The end of August feels much better than the beginning of August," a senior Bush official told the New York Times on Saturday. But this time, the Myth can't save Bush.
Eventually, harsh reality trumps even the totemic power of patriotism. The National Intelligence Estimate released last week confirmed what objective observers already knew: There has been no political progress in Iraq, and none can be foreseen. The situation on the ground, contrary to the rosy reports of U.S. generals, is deteriorating. The Associated Press reported that death tolls in Iraq from sectarian attacks this year are twice what they were a year ago. Also last week, the New York Times ran a devastating report showing that more Iraqis than ever have fled their homes since Bush's "surge" began -- yet another decisive piece of evidence that sectarian hatred in Iraq has long since passed the point at which it can be contained by the U.S.
This is not surprising when you look at the numbers. The war has resulted in an estimated 650,000 Iraqis dead, 1.1 million internally displaced and close to 2.5 million who have fled the country. These figures mean one in six Iraqis has been killed or is a refugee. Translated into American terms, this would work out to 50 million Americans killed or turned refugee -- a figure roughly equal to the population of the northeastern United States, including New York, New Jersey, Maryland and all of New England.
The inescapable truth is that Bush's war of choice has destroyed an entire nation -- and there is no way for the United States or anyone else to control what happens next. The increasingly shaky plight of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shows just how unstable Iraq's cobbled-together political system is. U.S. dreams of replacing him with a secular strongman like Ayad Allawi are delusional. The war is not winnable, and there is thus only one possible rationale for continuing it, the one Bush raised: preventing an even more apocalyptic blood bath than we have already caused.
If we knew that by staying we could avert such a blood bath, we would owe it to the Iraqi people, whom we have harmed so grievously, to remain. But the fact is that no one can really predict whether our departure will cause such a blood bath. Moreover, it is now obvious that the political and sectarian schisms that could lead to it will not heal themselves. As Gen. Petraeus has admitted, it might take a decade to achieve real stability in Iraq. In other words, Bush is asking the U.S. to keep troops in Iraq, possibly indefinitely, in an attempt to forestall an outcome that might never happen -- precisely what he argues we should have done in Vietnam.
This is not a scenario that Congress or the American people are going to accept. We are now approaching an endgame in Iraq that has its own inexorable logic, which not even Bush's appeals to the War Myth will be able to stop.
In some part of his brain, Bush knows this -- which explains his other motivation for invoking Vietnam and attacking war critics as defeatists. As a partisan Republican, still dreaming of Karl Rove's permanent Republican majority, he wants to ensure that the Democrats take the blame in the coming argument over "who lost Iraq?" By defiantly insisting, contrary to all evidence, that victory is within grasp, he is planting the seeds of a resentful revisionism, a stab in the back II, which he hopes will come to fruition in the future.
The climax of the slow-motion debate over Iraq is approaching. At some point in the near future, it will become inescapably obvious even to congressional Republicans, who hold the key to the decision to stay or go, that the war cannot be won. Bush will continue to proclaim that victory is within sight and accuse his critics of being defeatists.
But the War Myth cannot save him forever, because he's overused it. It will buy him a few weeks or months of breathing space, but even the talismanic power of the War Myth dissipates if people realize it has been used in a cheap, propagandistic way.
One of the problems, ironically for an administration that has sold itself with unparalleled skill, lies in the limitations of advertising. Advertising may be the most potent force in American culture. But war, like religion, is too sacred a subject to be sold in 30-second spots. Bush was able to successfully "roll out his product launch" for the war with a media campaign because that campaign didn't involve explicit advertising. The Freedom's Watch campaign, conversely, is self-defeating precisely because it is bought and paid for. The War Myth, like all myths, works better when the wires that hold it up are not visible.
As for Bush's own speeches, they have about as much credibility as bad advertisements. The president has lived by propaganda. But now that the end is approaching, even propaganda can no longer save him.
Bush's attempt to claim he was stabbed in the back is certain to meet the same fate. That notion will live on only where it always has, in the danker corners of the extreme right wing.
Bush, of course, will never acknowledge any of this. His tunnel vision is terminal, his addiction to the War Myth absolute. In his classic study of the Vietnam War, Stanley Karnow cites a speech made on April 23, 1975, days before the fall of Saigon, by President Gerald Ford. "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam," Ford said. "But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished ... These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world."
Bush will never be capable of uttering such words. He will go down certain that he was right, living the Myth to the end. And because of his addiction to unreality, many more real people will die.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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