P.R. War, Real Death and Cost

The Pentagon has admitted to seven families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that they weren't told the true circumstances of those deaths. The seven includes Pat Tillman, the football star who quit the NFL to volunteer after 9-11, who was apparently killed by other American troops, though it wasn't reported that way at first. His family has been quite vocal about uncovering the truth surrounding his death, and it seems likely to me that this Pentagon announcement was mostly cover for their supposedly inadvertent misreporting of the facts of his death. The other six may just be diversions.

Because Tillman's death wasn't just misreported--it was made into a story of heroism for the media. Through the Pentagon or otherwise, the Bush administration has hardly been shy about fabricating stories to make them sound like Hollywood war movies--perhaps the most notorious case was one of the first stories out of the Iraq war, concerning Jessica Lynch. There was hardly an element of the official story that Lynch hasn't since denied, or that others support.

Now the Pentagon wants to spend even more money on a special PR unit to "better promote its image" because the only war Don Rumsfeld concedes the U.S. is losing is an image war. But this shouldn't really be surprising. Controlling imagery and information has been key to the Bush administration's success at selling the war until now. No flag-draped coffins or body bags unloaded from airplanes in the sight of cameras. Very little information from Iraq that isn't controlled in one way or another.

And even though the news media is partly at fault for failing to cover this war objectively and thoroughly, there is one little known fact that is well worth mentioning: more journalists have died covering the Iraq war than died covering Vietnam, Korea or World War II.

But this is part of a larger pattern. All administrations have tried to control information and present a favorable face--they all use PR. It can be a legitimate and useful communcations tool. But this Bush administration is all about PR at its core, with no respect for truth or truth-telling. Lying has become its art.

As Iraq itself demonstrates, the image is more important than the reality, the name of a program or a law is more important than the program or the law itself, and the Administration's chief occupation is PR for itself. To this end it has put so-called journalists on the payroll as propagandists, changed the content of scientific reports by government agencies, and used the power of the Presidency to sell and promote statements, assertions and imagery that have no basis in reality, and which facts and reality often contradict. Let's not forget that ex-cheerleader George W. Bush's only success outside government was doing PR for a baseball team.

Now American voters may have disenthralled themselves, and stopped buying the made for TV version of reality that the Bush government has been selling. They may have even come out from the carefully controlled grip of fear--or in Barack Obama's great phrase, the 9-11 fever may have broken--so they are no longer terrorized by talk of terrorists winning if Democrats obtain a meaningful role in government through election.

The war fever has definitely broken, and that may be why the polls have shown for many weeks now that no matter what else happens, Iraq is foremost on American minds. The public may finally be dealing with the reality. They've stepped back from the administration's game to look underneath the shells, and they see nothing. Except the reality of Iraq.

There is a news report on Iraq that is worth quoting at length:

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is telling his inner circle that the situation in Iraq is "nearly out of control," according to CBS News intelligence sources. Pentagon sources tell the network that General Casey will require 100,000 more Iraqi troops than the 325,000 who were to be trained in order to secure the nation. The security situation, however, has worsened and Iraqi troops have proven to be less effective than their American counterparts. Additional American troops may be called up to help train the new Iraqi security forces, and the U.S. may also double the number of advisors in each Iraqi unit.

An AP report says that Rumsfeld has already approved spending an additional $1 billion on more Americans doing more training of Iraqi forces.

The David Edwards report continues:

Prime Minister Maliki has ordered that all checkpoints in Baghdad be lifted. Lara Logan of CBS News reports that some American troops expect that violence will now increase and are left questioning why U.S. Commanders would allow checkpoints to be removed now. The move is widely seen as a victory for Muqtada al-Sadr of Sadr City, who controls one of the largest militias in Iraq.

The Inspector General warns that Iraqis don't even have the capacity to fund or maintain their army. The Pentagon is being called upon to provide better weapons and armored vehicles to Iraqi security forces. The Pentagon's Inspector General has found that 14,000 small arms provided to the Iraqis are now missing. The lost weapons were never registered and can not be audited.

The Washington Post added this:

The top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., predicted last week that Iraqi security forces would be able to take control of the country in 12 to 18 months. But several days spent with American units training the Iraqi police illustrated why those soldiers on the ground believe it may take decades longer than Casey's assessment.

The problem now is that reality has become more fantastic, verging on madness, than the simple imagery of the Bush PR machine. It is out of control, not only of PR efforts to gloss it over, but tragically, of other efforts in reality.

But the Bushite Republicans cannot afford to allow for sensible debate and a sincere search for solutions, on Iraq or stem cell research or the Climate Crisis, because they are standing on a foundation of phony images and deception. The only tool left to them is the smear, the diversion, the false accusation, and what they know best: inflating and creating an image to distract the public from their lies and failures.

They're doing it in a wave of negative commercials, in the shameful speeches of the president and vice-president, and they've attempted to do it by seizing on an awkwardly delivered sentence to accuse John Kerry of maligning the troops in Iraq. But Kerry drew the line:

"If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they're afraid to debate real men. And this time it won't work because we're going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.