So now we’ve read the altogether expected news of the bleak prospects facing Iraq’s “founding fathers” in coming together over a workable constitution. Nevertheless the news continues to be framed in Bush’s surrealism - a mindset that has defined this ill-begotten venture from the outset.
“Iraqi leaders presented a disputed constitution to the country's parliament on Sunday, overriding the objections of Sunni negotiators,” reported the New York Times, “sending the document to voters and setting the stage here for a protracted period of political conflict.”
Setting the stage for protracted, political conflict? Setting the stage? Did we miss some period of calm somewhere that now threatens to break down? Is the situation in Iraq suddenly precarious? Suddenly dangerous? Just now suddenly falling apart?
“Some Sunnis said they expected guerrilla violence to surge,” continued the Times’s report.
That would be, would it not, a surge on top of the many surges already experienced, none of which have abated? In other words, horrific violence added to the steadily climbing horrific violence since “Bring ‘em on” George accomplished his mission there.
“A Sunni member of the constitutional committee, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, said, ‘We have reached a point where this constitution contains the seeds of the division of Iraq.’”
Contains the seeds of division? This would be the ethnic and sectarian divisions that have potentially splintered Iraq since its national inception, and that only a brutish dictator was able to hold together - the holding together of which every objective Middle East analyst predicted would come unglued once that iron hand of control was lifted?
But the surrealism surrounding these observations would not have been complete without a few quoted words from its chief architect.
“In the face of those developments, President Bush, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., praised the constitution as a milestone in Iraqi history....
“Mr. Bush sought patience,” the Times went on in an accompanying piece. "I want our folks to remember our own constitution was not unanimously received."
Only at the very end of that piece, introduced as “News Analysis,” did the Times toss a bit of reality into Bush’s surrealism. “What [Bush] left out of his analogy is that while the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia was convening, there was not an insurgency in the countryside that seemed to be growing because of disaffection with the political process.”
This was the “analysis” of his analogy? Did the story’s author and his team of editors stop to think of the myriad disconnects underlying Bush’s repeated distortion in comparing Iraq’s founding to that of the United States? This distortion has become yet the latest in Bush’s defense of our mission there, and it would seem a fuller analytical approach was incumbent on the Times.
Many a schoolchild would be puzzled by the historical omissions. Aside from the lack of an insurgency, there were also no comparable ethnic divisions in young America; and no heated religious disputes dominated by clerics; and no foreign power intervening in the constitution-writing’s process, casting the process itself as illegitimate. America also had a long and established history of democratic rights and freedoms, unlike Iraq. We had the Madisons and Franklins and Adamses - learned men steeped in political philosophy and possessing a determination to wed the pragmatic to the idealistic. And there was present a brief but poignant history that the government in place - operating under the flawed Articles of Confederation - couldn’t advance the young country in terms of national interests, arm in arm with the constitutional convention’s majority sentiment to overcome parochial interests.
I just spent perhaps two or three minutes writing that last paragraph, noting only the most strikingly obvious differences between Bush’s rhetoric and Iraq’s reality. I’m quite sure the Times put considerably more than that into the writing and editing of its “analysis,” so wouldn’t some actual analysis be in order?
As long as Mr. Bush’s fantasies, self-delusions, false optimism and surrealistic take on the world are passed along with little or no correction by the mainstream media, a passable base of public support for the war can remain and Americans will continue dying in a hopeless cause. It’s that fact behind the missing analysis that is critical.