Bush's 'Show' of Success

President George Bush’s sudden visit to Baghdad – and with his secretaries of State and Defense – is just another episode in a series of desperate attempts to transform the security failure in Iraq into a political and diplomatic victory. It was done in the hope of improving an image and whitewashing a facade that has long since been blackened … and in his last year in office – it’s an attempt by President Bush to improve on his previously disastrous accomplishments.

Despite the huge military machine at his disposal, up to now the president has been unable to impose his American-style terror, his military has failed to achieve its stated objectives for the war, among which are freedom, democracy and security, all of which are grand slogans that have been wiped out by the weight of severed heads, between the hands of unidentified corpses, and behind the sounds of booby traps and constant acts of violence … those that are hidden and those that are committed in public!

Iraq, which lives in a whirlpool of agonizing sectarian conflict and tortured politics, appears to have entered a stage of wholesale popular rejection of American policy. Perhaps with their colonial expertise, the British are better off and knew that it was time to formally withdraw from Basra – although the retain overall responsibility for security. This way the British killed two birds with one stone, showing their own people how serious they are about withdrawing at an appropriate time and meanwhile, proving to Iraqi citizens that they have no further ambitions. This is where the makers of American political, military or even mass media policy have failed, for they have yet to leave behind their culture of the rodeo cowboy in training.

The truth is that the Iraqi Prime Minister [Maliki] is in the midst of a crisis of America’s making. And since it’s a moral duty for Bush to help Maliki extricate himself, his visit was an attempt at a kind of theatrical presentation to counteract criticism over the mutual sniping the two men have engaged in, including during their twice-weekly conversations over closed-circuit TV.

America likes parading its muscle, and since it’s a culture based on the “show,” its leaders come and go with apparent complete safety and secrecy, touting how secure things have become. It’s a message Bush is trying to send to Americans resentful of the planes filled with coffins, so that he can continue the greatest deception of 21st century. It’s a deception in the name of justifying a war based on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda; it’s a deception in the name of freedom and democracy; a finally, and it’s a deception in the name of security, which completes the last chapter of this tragedy and outlines the central problem … who is right here?