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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: September theatrics at home and abroad http://NWAnews.com Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Northwest Arkansas Edition September theatrics at home and abroad Gene Lyons Comes September, the long-awaited Month of Decision on the Iraq war, and all parties with a career stake in the outcome have swung into action. Pretty, perky Katie Couric took her “CBS Evening News” program to Iraq, and who turned up? Why President Bush! What a coincidence that America’s least popular president and lowest-rated TV news anchor showed up simultaneously at a U.S. air base in convenient Anbar province. Next Bush jetted off to Sydney, bragging that the U.S. is “kicking ass” before gravely thanking Australia’s prime minister for visiting “Austrian” troops in Mesopotamia. Pure showbiz magic! Walking in Baghdad with Gen. David Petraeus, Couric displayed the journalistic rigor of a cheerleader interviewing the football captain. She all but asked to feel his muscles. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that the Dora Market, where Petraeus escorts visiting celebrities on flak-jacketed tours before whisking them off to dine on lobster tortellini and steak at the U.S. Embassy, is basically a U.S.-financed movie set patrolled by heavily armored Humvees and kept in business by $ 2,500 cash grants to shopkeepers. Serving a surf-’n’-turf special in the Iraqi desert may eventually symbolize the entire doomed enterprise. Even before Petraeus arrived back in Washington, however, he got upstaged by Osama bin Laden, the bearded psychopath who’s been the real brains behind American foreign policy since 9/11. Just before the 2004 presidential election, remember, the al-Qa’ida leader delivered a videotaped fatwa denouncing Bush for the transparent purpose of assuring his election. And why not? Under Bush, U.S. policy has faultlessly followed bin Laden’s blueprint for radicalizing Muslim youth from London to Islamabad. Coincidentally, bin Laden’s 2004 malediction appeared soon after Petraeus’ own pre-election career move, a Washington Post column declaring pre-surge Iraq a big success. Eighteen months into the war, Petraeus described great progress. “Iraq’s security forces,” he wrote, are “developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front... this trend will continue.” Now bin Laden, the David Koresh of the Middle East, speaks again. Oddly, he appears to have mistaken this September’s mummery for the real thing. Hasn’t he noticed that Bush fires generals who don’t tell him what he wants to hear? (Incidentally, do apprentice terrorists sit in coffee shops debating whether the Anointed One dyes his beard or is naturally virile like Ronald Reagan?) Three things have long been obvious: Bush can’t admit error, Democrats can’t make him, and Petraeus would don his fanciest dress uniform and favor Congress with his celebrated impression of the late Ethel Merman: “Everything’s comin’ up roses !” Apart from endorsing the “surge” by chastising Democrats for not ending it, the exact purpose of the latest bin Laden videos, with their multiple audiences, can only be guessed at. For example, what’s this all about ? “[T ]he reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa; all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.” Join al-Qa’ida for lower taxes and better mortgage rates ? Slate’s Anne Applebaum speculates that bin Laden’s actual purpose is to lure deranged idealists like John Walker Lindh, Westerners who can blend in among European or American crowds. Strategically, bin Laden must love the surge because it keeps the Chicken Little faction of the Republican right pounding its collective chest while continuing to waste lives and treasure fighting the wrong enemy. Last year, I pointed out that al-Qa’ida governs no Islamic nation and poses “no military threat to the integrity of the United States or any western nation. At worst, they’re capable of theatrical mass murder like the 9/11 attacks.” The adjective “theatrical” inflamed Chicken Littles, who didn’t notice it modified “mass murder.” Now comes Gen. Colin Powell in GQ magazine. “What is the greatest threat facing us now?” Powell asks. “People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?” What, then, is Petraeus’ game? With a Princeton Ph.D. and a reputation as a brilliant tactician, he surely realizes that getting sucked into a succession of Iraq-style guerrilla wars from Morocco to Pakistan would play directly into al-Qa’ida’s hands, with heaven knows what domestic political repercussions as the American empire foundered. Maybe he sees himself as Henry Kissinger to Bush’s Richard Nixon, camouflaging tactical retreat by calling it a surge, buying time until reasoned leadership takes over in January 2009. Realistically, that’s the best we can hope for.
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