Zarqawi and the Great Bush Spin Machine

The world is better off without Zarqawi. But Zarqawi was only a part of the violence in Iraq and unfortunately for everyone the war will go on. The more I have read over the last three years, the more a number of things have become clear. First and foremost, the problems in Iraq are far bigger than any one individual, violent though Zarqawi was. Second, before the war, the inner circle of the Bush Administration had almost zero understanding of those problems and little interest in knowing what they were. Third, the Bush Administration lied to the American people when it made its case for war. Fourth, Iraq was not an imminent threat and we launched a war we did not need with too few troops and no plans for the aftermath. Fifth, we are paying a price for Bush's deceits and incompetence.

Clearly, the war in Iraq is not always easy to understand. What exactly did Abu Ghraib have to do with democracy? What was the destruction of Fallujah supposed to accomplish? Why is our embassy in Baghdad the largest in the world?

We all remember Jessica Lynch from the beginning, a good soldier who was injured, captured and rescued; her story on that basis alone would have provided plenty of news stories. But the Bush Administration wanted a heroine of fictional proportions, until Jessica Lynch said no thanks and the spun story fell apart. There have been many such stories designed to serve a political purpose. Even the case for war was based largely on fictions, including the aluminum tubes story and the so-called Niger/Iraq uranium connection. And so it continues.

In Raw Story, Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post have a story on the multiple uses and spin that the administration has had for Zarqawi; here's two excerpts:

In addition to his indisputably prominent role in the Iraqi insurgency, Zarqawi was always a useful source of propaganda for the administration. Magnification of his role and of the threat he posed grew to the point that some senior intelligence officers believed it was counterproductive.

But the administration also occasionally found it useful to play down Zarqawi's importance and influence. In early 2004, the then-governing Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad triumphantly displayed an intercepted letter from Zarqawi to the al-Qaeda leadership that it said illustrated the terrorist's despair in the face of an increasingly competent U.S.-trained Iraqi security force.

(snip)

"Here's Zarqawi, the ultimate warrior," [said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, U.S. military spokesman], "trying to shoot his machine gun." The gun apparently jammed, and Zarqawi was seen motioning to a masked compatriot to help him. The great "warrior leader," Lynch mocked, "doesn't understand how to operate his weapon system."

Even worse, Lynch noted, was Zarqawi's "military" attire. Zarqawi's edited version of the video had left out the shiny white sneakers peeking out from beneath his intimidating black uniform, according to outtakes Lynch displayed.

But the U.S. psychological operation appeared to backfire, according to one military study of how it played in the Arab and American media. While some media outlets found Zarqawi ludicrous, most wondered why he was so hard to capture or kill if he was so incompetent.

Many of us believe in the importance of credibility and we try hard to get things right. But the multiple fictions of the Bush era are unprecedented. To this day, three long years after the invasion of Iraq, we still don't know how much Bush lied to the American people, how much he lied to himself, how much he was driven by flawed ideological assumptions and how much he said based on mistaken intelligence; but the evidence for the first circumstance has been growing ever since.