Surrealpolitik

On the night of June 12, shortly after Karl Rove received an e-mail from his attorney, Robert Luskin, informing him he would not be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the president’s chief political advisor appeared before a New Hampshire Republican Party group to deliver a call to arms for the midterm elections. Rove defined the theme for the upcoming contest, the last one of the Bush presidency, as the same one he had set after Sept. 11, 2001, when he ordered Republicans to polarize the country on the issue of terrorism and war. Democrats were weak and soft, he said; Republicans, strong and tough. Now, with Bush’s popularity at low ebb, Rove instructed the party to taint the Democrats as favoring “cutting and running” in Iraq.

The following week, on cue, the Republicans introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives against any “timetable” for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Overnight the divided and dispirited Republicans turned the tables on the Democrats. Even as the Democrats issued a program calling for a “new direction,” their own version of the 1994 Republican Contract With America, which carefully did not mention Iraq, they scattered in different directions upon mention of the war. Instilling discipline in their ranks would be a forbidding task even for a pack leader like Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer.” It was just as Rove had reckoned.

The House resolution passed easily last week and has moved on to the Senate, where Democratic divisions have once again been highlighted. The resolution has no binding authority, but instead is a purely political contrivance. No hearings have been held. Indeed, Congress as a body enforcing its constitutional mandate of oversight is virtually defunct. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is passive in its being trampled. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has put out a distorted report casting blame solely on the CIA for intelligence failures on the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Senate Armed Services Committee refuses to summon for testimony the commanding generals in Iraq who have called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Republican Senate this week voted against investigating the abuses of contractors in Iraq. Yet the Republicans are desperate to stage a symbolic vote on the war.

The Iraq resolution is above all a manifesto of articles of faith. We face “an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values”—not an insurgency against an occupation or a sectarian civil war. Then, “by early 2003,” Saddam Hussein “supported terrorists”—suggesting nonexistent links to al-Qaida. Now, “the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war”—suggesting that the effect is its own cause, not that terrorism has emerged in reaction against the U.S. occupation. Finally, we “will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.” Thus we battle one enemy despite his many faces, like Satan, and our goal is nothing mundane like stability or a political solution but “freedom.” Inserted into this credo is the tactical twist against a “timetable”—though Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, submitted a plan, a timetable, in November 2005 to Rumsfeld, at his insistence, for withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops this year. None dare call it “cut and run.”

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http://www.trueblueliberal.com/2006/06/22/surrealpolitik/#more-7665