The Green Zone Fantasy
June 26th, 2006 | by Paul Merda |We stay in Iraq because the GOP wants us to think this way:
The Congressional Republicans, whatever their private hesitations, were brought into line with the Rove plan and launched the sort of offensive that, in the past, has proven so ineffective in Iraq and so effective at home.
Given the disaster that Iraq actually is, some alterations of argument were obviously in order. Put in terms of Colin Powell’s infamous “Pottery Barn rule” (”If you break it, you own it”), this particular formulation would go something like: You’ve barged into Pottery Barn, an invading bull in a China shop and you’ve been breaking things right and left ever since; management, employees, and other customers are enraged, so what choice do you have but to stay and keep breaking things? Bail out now and all those angry folks will be heading for your house to break your things.
Why can’t we leave?
Joshua Marshall of the Talking Points Memo website recently described the President as “like an owner of a business that’s slowly going under… And he won’t just liquidate and save what he can, because then he’d have to come to grips with the fact that he’s failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.”
How Insulated is Dear Leader?
George in the Green Zone: On his Potemkin travels, the President has long taken a portable Green Zone with him. On the campaign trail, he almost never met an audience that hadn’t been carefully vetted and so seldom found himself face to face with a questioner who wasn’t beyond friendly, outright obsequious, or absolutely fawningly admiring. Put another way, with rare exceptions, his world is regularly cleared of reality as he approaches. On his foreign travels, this happens with clocklike regularity. Major metropolises are simply shut down or cleared of humanity, so that, like the USS Abraham Lincoln for his infamous “Mission Accomplished” tailhook landing, they become but movie sets on which he can tell his Green-Zone stories about how the world works without fear of complaint or contradiction.
How was that trip to Vienna Dear Leader (via Charles Bremner)?
The centre of Vienna has been locked down since Bush’s arrival on Air Force One last night. Streets are closed to traffic and parks and squares are locked shut. Bomb disposal squads are checking suitcases. The unusual quiet makes it feel like a prettier version of Soviet Moscow on the morning of the old November parades. Military helicopters are hovering over the Hofburg, the old Imperial Palace… We are working alongside in the usual vast press centre inside a cordon of about 2,000 police. To enter means penetrating three cordons, with the right credentials. At two of them, they searched all my bags and asked me to show that my computer and mobile phone were real. Dogs then sniffed them, along with the laundry in my overnight bag.
No wonder Dear Leader thinks things are going so well in Iraq, he’s rarely heard one dissenting voice. Dear Leader lives in his own Green Zone fantasy and he and the GOP are trying to build one for us all…
