Try Again

Interesting bit this morning about a new strategic push from the Junta Central Fortress. They're scratching their heads over the lack of progress since their dirty re-election. They wanted to do all sorts of things, and yet have accomplished nothing but produce many more dead Iraqis and Americans (in Iraq and the Gulf Coast). And yet people like them less. Huh.

What's revealing is that they see everything in terms of its political implications. Iraqi policy needs to be re-lied about. The old lies are no longer operating, so how will new lies be manufactured and communicated? There's no hind of doing anything substantively different. There's no new approach to 'winning' in Iraq (whatever that means), but more attention to talking about it. How do we convince people we know what we're doing, regardless of the fact that we obviously don't?

Typically, there's this:

Bush agreed to try the approach [telling the truth!] so long as he did not come
off sounding too negative. Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University specialist on
wartime public opinion who now works at the White House, helped draft a 35-page
public plan for victory in Iraq, a paper principally designed to prove that Bush
had one.

"Sounding too negative" translates as "admitting to how badly run and disastrous it all is."

Others might think: "we have gigantic problems - how do I fix them?"

Georgie thinks: "we have gigantic problems - how to I conceal them?"