The Poet's Eye
commentary by Lightning Rod
the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgemental
The Lizard's Tail
05-05-04
In the past few days we have seen the minions of Bushco scrambling to minimize the damage that the recent revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq have done to the reelection effort. They loudly decry the dirty business involved with conquering a country, and lay the blame solidly on their underlings. "We will root out the miscreants and punish them," they say. "We will find the sinners and cast them out." Torture and abuse are not unusual events in the waging of wars. They go with the territory. But long ago the lizard learned to lose his tail. This is a public relations problem.
When you march 150,000 armed men and women into a country for the purpose of setting their political affairs in order and incidentally grabbing control of their natural resources, you can expect a certain amount of disgruntlement. War is not a pleasant business and in the course of wars people get hurt. It's the nature of the beast. Conquest does not happen without death, injury, insult, abuse and domination.
Here's the rub about the current prisoner abuses. The US went into Iraq under the snow white flag of liberation. We deposed a tyrant because, oh well, he didn't have weapons of mass destruction and he was not exactly connected to Al Queda even though he was a Muslim. But he was a real bad guy and he tortured his people. Now WE are torturing his people. That's a real triumph for democracy.
The self-righteous always face the same problem--they must live up to their own preaching. It's harder to sell the world on the notion that you are in the business of liberating a country from an abusive tyrant when Al Jazeera and CBS are broadcasting pictures of Muslims naked in the prayer pose being mocked by our soldiers in the same prison that Saddam used for similar purposes. It starts looking less like a liberation and more like a simple change of management.
We see the President and Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld on TV saying that this is just an isolated band of terrorists in the US Army and assorted other private cadres who are responsible for the un-American behavior and we will hunt them down and make them pay for following the orders that we gave them. Condi Rice and the President are doing interviews on Arab tv. That's when you know that the PR situation is critical.
The Poet's Eye sees that when the talk doesn't match the walk, you are walking on shaky ground. When a political corporation bases its entire product line on the concept of image over substance, then it lives and dies by image. When a Jim Baker or a Jimmy Swaggart falls from grace it is a particularly resounding fall because the pedestal had such altitude. The images of a strutting Bush in a flight suit with a codpiece under a Mission Accomplished banner when soldiers are still coming home in boxes are embarrassing. Likewise the pictures of Iraqis standing on crates, hooded and hooked up to batteries are hardly reconcilable with the picture of Iraqi freedom that this administration advertises. And this administration is all about advertising.
We can safely bet that the strategists in the White House tonight are discussing, not the issue of how to stop further abuses of the war, but how to minimize the reality conflict that is troubling their political future. Reports indicate that Buscho knew about these abuses for several months but not until the pictures hit the world press did it become a recognizable problem to them because it was a PR problem.
The Poet's Eye expects to see the government serving up the requisite scapegoats, a National Guardsman here and there, a few independent contractors, a sergeant or two, maybe a female general and Bushco will kiss these abuses off like the Catholic Church kisses off its terrorist priests. This is a tried and true tactic that was invented by the reptiles. A lizard has a mechanism to disconnect its tail in times of peril. It's a method of cutting your losses--sacrificing the part to preserve the whole. The tails grow back.
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"The lady does protest too much, methinks"
- William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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