Iraq: 'I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about your progress.' by Maureen Dowd The New York Times 9:20am 5th Nov, 2003   ("Crawford George Aka Baghdad Bob" by Maureen Dowd.Published by the New York Times on November 1, 2003)    In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister covering grim reality with wilful, idiotic optimism.    "He's my man," Bush laughingly told TV interviewer Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, aka "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob", who assured reporters, even as US tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war . . . This is for sure."    Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.    Speaking to reporters this week, Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.    In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."    The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to America's security) based on a quartet of false premises (that the US and its allies could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratise Iraq without leeching America's economy).    Now Bush illogic continues: the more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops America seems to need in Iraq, the less America needs to send more troops.    The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and weapons of mass destruction, the less they mattered anyhow. The more co-ordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on America's soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.    In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from the Iraqi city of Tikrit, US Major-General Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even understand the political utility of truth.    After admitting recently that Saddam had no connection to September 11, the President pounded his finger on his lectern on Tuesday, while vowing to stay in Iraq, and said: "We must never forget the lessons of September 11."    Bush looked buck-passy when he denied that the White House, which throws up PowerPoint slogans behind his head on TV, was behind the "Mission Accomplished" banner that flew above his head when he declared victory on an aircraft carrier six months ago. And Donald Rumsfeld looked duplicitous when he acknowledged in a private memo, after brusquely upbeat public briefings, that America was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.    No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of missiles turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz arrived there to showcase successes.    But the fear of young American soldiers who don't speak the language or understand the culture, who don't know who's going to shoot at them, was captured in a front-page picture in Wednesday's New York Times: two soldiers leaning down to search the pockets of one small Iraqi boy.    Bush, staring at the presidential election campaign hourglass, has ordered that the "Iraqification" of security be speeded up, so Iraqi cannon fodder can replace American sitting ducks. But Iraqification won't work any better than Vietnamisation unless the Bush crowd stops spinning.    Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Bright Shining Lie, recalls then US defence secretary Robert McNamara making Wolfowitz-like trips to Vietnam, spotlighting good news, yearning to pretend insecure areas were secure.    "McNamara was in a jeep in the Mekong Delta with an old army colonel from Texas named Dan Porter," Sheehan told me. "Porter told him, 'Mr Secretary, we've got serious problems here that you're not getting. You ought to know what they are.' And McNamara replied: 'I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about your progress.' "    "If you want to be hoodwinked," Sheehan concludes, "it's easy."    (Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with The New York Times, where this article first appeared).
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