A Frantically Spinning White House

Make sense of this, if you can: The number of U.S. soldiers killed in the occupation of Iraq now exceeds the American death toll in the "liberation" of that unhappy country, the demarcation day of May 1 having been announced by GI George while disguised as a fighter pilot. The American administrator says the reconstruction of Iraq cannot be achieved without "several tens of billions of dollars" to rebuild its war-torn infrastructure and shattered economy. And President Bush has a new explanation for why we're there: It's the new battleground for the war on terror. We must press on, he says, until "total victory", confronting the terrorist menace in the desert so that "our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles".

Never mind that most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, the President has always insisted it was Iraq that posed an "imminent" threat to the security of the United States. Never mind that after three months of looking, our military forces have not yet found any evidence of an imminent nuclear, chemical, or biological threat, the ostensible reason for our pre-emptive invasion. Well, forget about that. President Bush would have us believe the real reason we are occupying this hostile land is to build the Arab world's first democracy. Terrorists hate democracy and freedom and that is the reason they are flocking to Iraq to take potshots at us. They know that once the Arabs groaning under the rule of hateful dictatorships see how great the Iraqis have it in their new democracy, they will want one too. They will forget about all this jihad stuff and there will be peace and brotherhood in the Middle East.

"See", says Mr. Bush to the friendly crowd at the American Legion convention, "we had it planned all along but the American public wouldn't have understood all this complicated geopolitical stuff. They would have said 'Hey, aren't you the guy who said we wouldn't go 'nation-building' and meddling in everyone else's business?' But trust us. We know what we're doing."

Plainly, no matter how White House political guru Karl Rove spins it, the administration doesn't know what it is doing. It doesn't understand the Middle Eastern people or their history. It doesn't know how to pay for a war that will be much longer and more bloody than they projected in their arrogance. It doesn't know what to say to American soldiers stationed indefinitely as sitting ducks. Now that terrorists have answered the call of the President to "bring 'em on" it doesn't know how to stop them. It doesn't know what to say to its corporate friends assured easy pickings rebuilding a grateful, pacified country now encountering a war zone. It doesn't know how to swallow its pride and seek help from other nations under a United Nations umbrella. It doesn't know what to do about Iran - remember Iran? - which may indeed be developing the nuclear weapons Iraq was not developing.

It doesn't know much. That should worry us all.