Frank Rich's New Book: "Why We Are Really In Iraq" (To Win Midterms?)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/21/rich/

Why we are really in Iraq
Bush dragged the U.S. to war so the GOP could win midterm elections -- and the press went along for the ride -- argues the New York Times' Frank Rich.
By Gary Kamiya

Sep. 21, 2006 |

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But even if Rich's book is mostly a chronological retelling of familiar tales, it is invaluable as a comprehensive record of the tawdry machinations of a debased presidency, a kind of one-stop-shopping mall for all things truthy and Bushiful. Need a pithy, accurate account of the "Mission Accomplished" episode? Check. Need to refresh your memory about Bush's various, contradictory accounts of his relation to "Kenny Boy"? Check. Searching for a record of bleak news bulletins that were immediately followed by sudden "revelations" of impending terrorist attacks? Check. Want a transcript of what Cheney actually said about the nonexistent link between Saddam and 9/11? Check.

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Rich situates this sad story in a larger cultural frame, which he alludes to in his subtitle: "The Decline and Fall of Truth." In a brilliantly incisive and damning epilogue -- these 20 pages alone are worth the price of the book -- he writes, "the very idea of truth is an afterthought and an irrelevancy in a culture where the best story wins." That culture, he notes, took off in the mid 1990s, when "the American electronic news media jumped the shark. That's when CNN was joined by even more boisterous rival 24/7 cable networks, when the Internet became a mass medium, and when television news operations, by far the main source of news for most Americans, were gobbled up by entertainment giants such as Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. While there had always been a strong entertainment component to TV news, that packaging was now omnipresent ... In this new mediathon environment, drama counted more than judicious journalism." The Bush administration did not create this culture, he notes, but it "was brilliant at exploiting it to serve its own selfish reality-remaking ends." To his credit, Rich does not claim that America's infotainment culture was the decisive factor that allowed Bush to wage a war whose likely consequences, as he points out, could cause Bush to be judged the worst president in American history. But he is indisputably correct that it played an important role.

Of course, Rich is hardly the first to anatomize the decline of America's news culture. Far more compelling -- and originally argued -- is his insight into the real reason Bush went to war in Iraq. His answer to this endlessly debated question, and his related excursus on the personality of Bush himself, may be the single most lucid and convincing one I've ever read. Although it is almost painfully obvious, and wins the Occam's Razor test of being the simplest, it is put forward considerably less often than more ideological theories -- whether about controlling oil, supporting Israel, establishing American hegemony, or one-upping his father.

Perhaps this is because Americans, in their innocence, cannot accept that any president would deliberately launch a major war simply to win the midterm elections. Yet Rich makes a powerful argument that that is the case.

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If Rich is right and Bush committed the worst military blunder in 2,000 years so that ... drumroll please ... the GOP could win the midterms, the Iraq war will single-handedly overturn Marx's dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. For Iraq would then be both tragedy and farce -- an idiotic reality TV show, hastily produced for sweeps week, in which the contestants actually die. A war that would require a Frank Rich to do justice to it.

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[deminks]

1. My favorite part of this article

(snip)

..."How do you run as a vainglorious 'war president' if the war looks as if it's winding down and the number one evildoer has escaped?"

The answer: Wag the dog. Attack Iraq.

(end snip)

I have been saying this from day 1 of the imposter's rule. At times I have asked which tail was wagging the dog, for it seems that there has been of late more than one tail.

as Goebbels said (paraphrasing here), you can only maintain the BIG LIE as long as the people do not find the truth.

K & R.

[Hissyspit]

2. .