Falling Guys:
It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.Frank Rich/NYTimes/CommonDreams 08.Jul.07
No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.
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Expect more and more of this, with an increasing intensity, as things ravel further. Rich frames the urgency as Bush, Bush is what's wrong. The default and readily available response is get rid of Bush. Problem solved. Unless that isn't what's wrong.
That view depends for its legitimacy on Iraq being a mistake, on everything about the invasion and occupation being a mistake or series of mistakes, or mistakes within what may or may not have been larger more complicated mistakes.
So that the invasion, deceptive and fictional as its causative reasons were, intentional though that deception was, is now just a profound mistake. Mistakenly begun, and mistakenly carried out. Made by Bush, or at its most conspiratorial, Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld. Three white men with delusions of something or other.
And in that bland conspiracy Libby was nothing more than "a pathetic little...guy" who got set up and has now taken a sort of "fall". Though what that fall consists of is hard to determine, except that he has a notoriety now he didn't before. He certainly has a lot more publicly visible sources of income than he did. And champions of one kind or another, including in this low-key, back-handed way, Frank Rich of the New York Times. The Times bearing a large responsibility for shaping the public's view of Iraq, Saddam, the invasion and consequent occupation, and now what to do about the "mistake".
Another view might be that this was intended, all of it. The destruction of Iraq conceived and planned for and carried out successfully - Mission Accomplished.
In that view the actual "fall guy" would be Bush, primarily, and the adjectival "pathetic" and "little" could accurately be extended to all, even to those of us way out here at the edge of things, with our "pathetic" "little" dismay and frustrated helplessness.
The problem with that view in an almost biological sense is it leads directly into an engagement with sinister forces at work in the things, the systems and architectures, that operate to give us cohesion, that provide the "us" of our commonality. That commonality requires an economy, and government, and especially information services that speak to us and for us as part of what we are.
But if this other view is correct, if the New York Times and Frank Rich and Michael Gordon and Judith Miller and Dana Milbank and all the rest of them are and have been all along working toward other, unstated and very different purposes, not speaking for, but to deceive and manipulate, then we don't have that cohesion, except by being victims of it, of them, of whatever it is that's done this to us and what we might have been if this had not happened.
