The Bush Administration has become so disconnected with reality, so profoundly arrogant and so isolated that it has become nothing more than an annoying obstacle that the world must sidestep around as it tries to fix the messes Bush makes.
Recently, the Decider Dude made another scary speech (see cartoon above) in which he once again made his pitch that Iraq is the" central front on the war on Terror", but this time he dug up old intelligence reports. Polls show that the majority of Americans aren't buying the Iraqi "central front" thesis, largely because the logic it's founded on is weak. Basically, it goes like this: "Terrorists are bad people. The people who are attacking us in Iraq are bad people. Therefore by killing the bad people in Iraq, we will get rid of bad people around the world. It's true because we say so." Now, it is true that the occupation of Iraq has been a big boost to Al-Qaeda, both in terms of fundraising and recruitment. It also allows Al-Qaeda to spruce up its image in the Islamic world by portraying themselves as defending Iraqis against foreign infidel troops, rather than as crazy murderers of innocents. This is hardly an endorsement of our policy of continuing the occupation, however. It's not as if there is some specific number of "terrorists" in Iraq that never changes, and if we can only kill off that number, then no more will take their place. It's also not like these "terrorists" all wear black hats and stand around twirling their handlebar moustaches in a sinister way to make picking them out in a crowd easier. And if we do drive them out of Iraq, they will simply go someplace else and do essentially the same thing there, so that's not any improvement. And lastly, having troops in Iraq does nothing to prevent terrorists from coming here.
If your local police chief placed every one of his officers on a single street corner and claimed that criminals would now flock to that corner to commit their crimes and thus be apprehended by the large police presence, you would probably label the chief as a simpleton. Yet this is the logical basis for Bush's "Iraqi central front" argument.
Up to now, however, Bush has countered this by implying that he is privy to intelligence reports that prove him right, but he can't share this secret information with us. So he made a special Decider decision and declassified some old intelligence reports to prove to sceptics that Iraq really is, in fact, the "Central Front in the War on Terror". And he made this daring public revelation to an audience of employees (Coast Guard) who are required to keep a straight face.
Here is that super-secret "proof", in a nutshell:
People who were tortured told their captors about two plots to attack targets in the U.S. In both cases, these 'plots' were merely in the concept stage and neither 'plot' had anything to do with Iraq. And there were also reports from Britain that have since been proven to be exaggerations, but which Bush presented as gospel truth. These 'plots' also had nothing to do with Iraq.
It is silly to have to say this, but simply because we have troops in Iraq does not mean that every terrorist plot that is disrupted is due to the presence of our troops in Iraq. In my police chief analogy, if two car thieves decide to go out for beers rather than steal cars parked miles away from the chief's selected corner, then this would be proof that his policy of placing all his forces on that corner was working.
Bush, however, seems to think that his point has been proven and we can all expect him to continue to make the case that the occupation of Iraq is about fighting terrorism, not refereeing a civil war. This, of course, is because a referee cannot "win", and Bush has, strangely, cast an occupation as something that can be 'won' or 'lost'. Doncha wanna win? Instead, he has miscast Al-Qaeda as equivalent to a regular army, which we can militarily defeat and thus win. Sadly, this characterisation has no basis in reality. There is no Al-Qaeda territory that we can take, there is no headquarters that can be overrun, there are no 'front lines', and there are no Al-Qaeda uniforms. The situation has far more in common with a law enforcement scenario, rather than a military battlefield. We would not call out the Army to 'defeat' the forces of tax fraud, for example. We would not portray criminals as having a central leadership, uniforms declaring themselves to be criminals, or a headquarters that must be stormed in order to 'defeat' all crime once and for all.
Yet this is what Bush's "central front" thesis is based upon - distortions of the truth. "The occupation is a war. Al-Qaeda is an army. Troops in Iraq keep plots in California from being carried out."
Meanwhile Al-Sadr is planning an end run by making Al-Maliki as irrelevant as Bush and getting an Iraqi demand for withdrawal passed in Parliament.
Meanwhile the Republicans are making a "Plan B" that consists of a 50% troop reduction if the 'surge' is officially determined to have failed.
Meanwhile the U.S. generals in Iraq are coming up with novel definitions of the word 'success' to use in their reports on the occupation.
All this while the Decider Dude rants on about stuff nobody believes in or cares about anymore.
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