On Wednesday, in a speech at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, President Bush ostensibly unveiled a new plan for victory in the war in Iraq. Anyone who listened to or read the speech quickly realized that it was nothing of the sort. The new plan for victory is simply a declassified version of the same strategy which has been implemented for the past two years in Iraq. What the president said on Wednesday was almost exactly what he has been saying ever since it became clear that Operation Mission Accomplished was premature: "stay the course." While the president's speech was monumentally unremarkable to those hoping for a response to ineffective foreign policy, it did reveal that the true war the Bush administration is fighting is at home.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the speech was the brainchild of Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver, who is also a member of the National Security Council. Dr. Feaver's research suggests that the public's willingness to fight wars is related not to inverse casualty rates but to a perception that victory is likely. While this is a controversial finding within the academic community, it has clearly been adopted by the Bush Administration, which has been engaged in a campaign to paint a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq for months. Now, with casualty rates rising and opposition to the war at home growing, the campaign to convince the American people that victory is just around the corner has apparently jumped into overdrive.
The Bush Administration is evidently more concerned with the political threat posed by the perception of failure in Iraq than it is with the threat posed by an overstretched military and an insurgency growing in intensity, capability and confidence. The president continues to refuse to acknowledge mistakes, or even that corrections may be necessary. His response to failure has traditionally been to simply speak louder and more frequently; but with the tide of public opinion threatening to drown his presidency, the administration has indicated that it is willing to resort to any means necessary to win the war at home.
This includes the use of propaganda. A story broken by the Los Angeles Times last week provided a glimpse of what may be in store for Americans in the next few years. The Defense Department has admitted to paying Iraqi journalists to publish stories which contribute to the perception of American victory in Iraq. Setting aside the implications this behavior has on the Iraqi effort to establish a free press, what the story shows, in an affirmation of the lesson of the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals, is yet more evidence of a general disregard for objectivity by the Bush administration.
A leader who cares more about convincing people that he is right than he does about actually being right, and who is willing to buy off the press and use it as a means to this end, is no leader at all. He has entered the territory of narcissistic faith, personality cult and doctrinal desperation. Effective policy is formed around facts. Ineffective leaders try to save face by declaring victory and fabricating facts to support policies which have failed yet are mandated by ideology. Fortunately for all of us, the Constitution anticipates the possibility of poor leadership and provides a mechanism for avoiding the uglier side of government, which subjugates the good of the state to ideology and ego.
