Not One Day

I have already written here and in a previous blog about the speech that Bush gave on the evening of the first day of the Iraq War in March of 2003, a speech which ended with Bush's reassurance that the troops would stay until the job is done and not one day longer, or words to that effect. I have heard him repeat those words several times in the intervening years, yet they seem as much without meaning now as they did back then on that evening in March of 2003.
Strangely, this evening, from out of the blue while I was reading a novel about life up in "the county" here in Maine, it dawned on me that there's another way to think about it. Let me try to express it here.
One way to look at the job the troops are doing in Iraq is the way Bush painted the picture that March evening. The troops had a job to do in Iraq. Saddam was seen as a threatening and domineering dictator virtually rolling in the wealth of his nation's oil money. He was painted to the American public as being someone who had stockpiled massive amounts of very dangerous weapons which he could at any time he wished distribute to Islamic terrorists to use against Americans anywhere in the world including right here in the USA. The job of the troops was to remove Saddam from power and capture and destroy Iraq's "weapons of mass murder." Once that job was done, Bush assured us, the troops would immediately come home. They would stay "not one day longer."
Fine, except that led nearly all Americans to think that the troops would be in the fight in Iraq for maybe a few months, maybe as much as a year, and then come home. Within a year we had discovered that there were no such weapons remaining in Iraq, that there weren't even any at the time of the invasion, none even on the evening of that speech that Bush gave on that March evening. Also within that year we had captured Saddam. Yet the US troops stayed. And they stayed. And they stayed. And they stayed. And they remain there today for job after job after job after job and behind the scenes America has spent tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars building permanent US military bases and a permanent mega embassy in Iraq.
So that first vision of not staying one more day hasn't stood up to the test of time.
Another way to look at it is this. What Bush may actually have been intending but not willing to say to us was that we will keep our troops in Iraq for as long as we can find jobs for them to do. The meaning of that is exactly the opposite of the message conveyed in Bush's speech, yet his speech, when you give it some thought, doesn't preclude this intent. And when it comes to the test of time, this second way of looking at it seems far more accurate than the first.
Give it some serious thought.

Framed

Last night I watched the interview of President Bush on the PBS News Hour. I am struck by how much attention the media is paying to this so-called "surge" in Iraq. What I saw the president saying didn't seem to align with what the media has been making of this "new" approach. In other words, my question is, "What's new about it?" I think what President Bush was really saying was, "Not much."
I have a tendency to think that the way the American media has been framing the Iraq war is quite different from the way the White House has been framing it even though the White House has been doing it right out in the open for all of us to see. But the thing is, the White House hasn't gone out of its way to point out the difference, or if they have, they haven't bothered to mention that the media is framing it wrong. Perhaps it has been convenient for the media to portray the war as something that will end soon. Perhaps that helps win public support.
This PBS interview was a good example of what I'm talking about...
The interviewer, PBS News Hour's Jim Lehrer, kept framing the questions in such a way as to let the president explain how his new approach will hasten victory and thus how it will bring about the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
President Bush kept replying about how important it is for the US to succeed in Iraq. But he defined success in terms that don't lend themselves to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq or from the Middle East. He defined success in terms of establishing governments friendly to US interests. He defined success in terms of preventing the money that purchases Middle East oil from getting into the hands of radical Islam. He defined success in terms of preventing governments friendly to radical Islam from controlling the supply of oil. And he defined success in terms of implementing the new Iraq oil law which assures access to Iraq's oil by multinational corporations.
Jim Lehrer framed the interview in terms of bringing home the troops. President Bush framed the interview in terms of keeping the US troops busy in the Middle East. He did not frame it in terms of bringing them home.
But that's the thing. The White House has framed this war as a generational conflict right from the beginning. They haven't done a particularly good job of explaining it to the American people, but they haven't exactly kept it hidden either. On the other hand, the American media has refused to cover this whole concept of a generational war. The war will go on for as long as there is a significant quantity of oil beneath the feet of Muslims. The White House not only knows this but has been telling us this ever since Bush became President of the United States. And if you do a little research you will find that the neo-conservatives have been telling us this for decades. All that was needed was for something to jump-start American public opinion to get the war going.
But the strange thing is that this isn't a "liberal media" vs. "conservative media" thing. The American public is being exposed to this false "bring the troops home soon" frame by all media outlets in the United States. There isn't a single American media outlet that I know of that is presenting this war from the perspective of the White House. What's really going on in the Middle East is out of sight to the American public, both liberal and conservative.
For instance, I was talking with my brother-in-law the other day. He's been pro-war for far longer than the war's been going on so he supports Bush all the way. He also listens to a lot of conservative talk radio. He expressed to me how angry he is with Maine's Senator Olympia Snowe who is expressing opposition to this new "surge" idea. He framed it with an analogy to a carpenter who had a new house three-quarters built and there was a debate about quitting before the job is done. As I recall, Olympia Snowe correctly framed it as the threat of a new form of aggression against Iran. My brother-in-law, well informed by conservative talk radio, hadn't even taken that into consideration. How can the job of rebuilding be three-quarters complete if we launch into Iran for a decades-long war against Islam? The idea seemed new to my brother-in-law and he wasn't prepared to say whether we should go to war with Iran. He certainly wasn't prepared to explain how this "surge" and Bush's rhetoric will prevent such a war.
The fact that the entire American media, liberal, conservative, and otherwise including nearly all the blogs, is framing this war debate in terms of victory and the returning troops leads me to believe that this debate is being framed by someone who has a great deal of control over American propaganda. You see, this whole notion that there will soon be a victory and the troops will soon be coming home is just that, just propaganda, just a carrot on a stick to get the American public to continue supporting this war. The whole notion that the war is against "radical Islam" which all westerners need to fear is propaganda. The war is for western interests, multinational corporate interests, to dominate Middle Eastern governments, people, and resources. There will be no recognizable "victory" in this war. We should take Bush for his word when he explains that to us.
We should begin to listen using the framework laid out by the White House, not by the media propaganda machine.

Oily Mess

Privatize or nationalize?
What is to become of Iraq's oil fields and the profits from oil and will the people of Iraq accept it or fight back?
The White House is lobbying Iraq's government to quickly pass a law to settle the debate. Oil companies are poised to profit.
I tend to think this is a bit more controversial than the White House is letting on. I mean really, when in the past six years has anything come from the White House that wasn't a controversy being masked as something that's for the public good? So what's behind this new mask?
Some old history...
This is a complicated topic. It's no wonder the White House has consistently denied that this oil is why we went to war with Iraq.
So, does Iran have oil too?
What I don't understand is that it is said that Iraq has up to 200 million barrels of oil. If we have, as is claimed, spent $400 billion on the Iraq war, then if we did it for the oil, we have already spent $2,000 a barrel and the oil is still right there in the ground under the feet of the Iraqi insurgency. Am I the only one to whom this math seems a bit foolish?
No wonder Spectrum 7 had problems! Some people just don't seem to have what it takes when it comes to math...

Disgust

I was just trying to read Michelle Malkin, conservative blogger. I didn't get very far. I was looking to see if she had made mention of the offense that conservatives have supposedly taken this week to some comment made by California's Barbara Boxer to Condi Rice about Rice not having any family to pay the price in the Iraq war. I didn't get far enough into her blog to find out if she mentions that.
I have a problem whenever I try to listen to the conservative point of view, whether it's from conservative friends and relatives, conservative blogs, conservative preachers in church, conservative media hosts, or whoever. I'm wondering if the problem I have with them is a problem that conservatives also perceive with liberals. Let me give an example.
I won't mention names because I'm too lazy to go find this guy's name but a conservative friend loaned us part of a set of videos that she had used to home school her kids and the videos were hosted by a museum curator who held himself out to be an expert on the subject of creation science. That's what the videos were about. And in one of the videos this expert on science held out the legends of dragons in folklore as proof that dinosaurs existed during the same time period as mankind. I nearly jumped out of my chair when he said that! In fact, I probably did and probably went into an immediate rant once my laughter had subsided.
That little example and my reaction of disgust is a perfect example of why I have such a hard time listening to the conservative perspective. I'm content enough to entertain that conservatives have legitimate complaints about liberals, but they all tend to mask those complaints behind these ridiculous efforts to bend themselves over backwards in denial of one thing or another. There's always this perfectly obvious cloak of baseless denial that conservatives use to promote their ideas. They can't seem to avoid it. It's part of their way of framing issues.
And when I come across it in their arguments I'm disgusted by it. It's a real turn-off!!
But is this tendency unique to conservative thought or is it something that both conservatives and liberals have in common? Do liberals also use denial of obvious truth to frame their arguments? Any good examples? Are conservatives as turned off by this as I am? And why is it that conservatives can't seem to see how ridiculous it is to argue this way? My own experience has been that conservatives are insulted when truth is introduced into an argument. It's as though it's against the rules to frame an argument with the truth, and for me this makes it a disgusting experience to listen to the conservative point of view.

Linkrot

I came across a new term just now. Not that it's new new, I mean, just invented, but it's new to me and even new in the sense that the Internet is still a new phenomenon. The word is "linkrot" or perhaps link rot. It refers to the way hypertext links in web pages stop working for various reasons. Some links point to web sites that are no longer available. Some links are old paths to web sites that have moved leaving behind no forwarding address. Yet others point to websites that are only available to paying subscribers.
I beg my readers to forgive me if this process is happening to my blog!