Reality-Based Community

Sidney Blumenthal sees the events of the last couple of weeks in pretty much the same way I do, looking at reality beyond CNN's relentless cheerleading for Bushco:

"Mission Accomplished" in a business suit

Ignoring U.S. intelligence, Bush inflated Zarqawi, then made a pointless trip to Iraq to pose as a heroic dragon slayer. It doesn't work anymore.

If Zarqawi's killing was a new version of Saddam Hussein's capture ("We got him!"), Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad on Tuesday was "Mission Accomplished" in a business suit. Six months after the Iraqi election, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at last having appointed defense and interior ministers amid sectarian civil war, Bush declared, "They themselves have to get some things accomplished." One thing Bush was attempting to accomplish was a reversal of his own political fortunes. Zarqawi's death had provided a convenient platform for the unfolding of his scripted theater featuring a two-day Camp David retreat of his war cabinet, the midnight flight to Baghdad and repeated references to Sept. 11, but no broad new initiatives for a political solution. .... The depth and breadth of the insurgency are depicted in a new documentary, "Meeting Resistance," that has not been publicly released. It is directed by Molly Bingham, an American journalist who was briefly jailed in Abu Ghraib by Saddam's regime at the onset of the U.S. invasion, and Steve Connors, a British journalist. This breakthrough film, the single most astonishing documentary yet on the Iraq war, portrays a full range of insurgents, from fighters to spies to imams, speaking in their own voices, explaining their motives and actions, from the first days of the insurgency onward. "I began to see something, that we had become an occupied country," says one who became a warrior. It is as though "The Battle of Algiers" had been shot from the inside, from the point of view of the insurgents, and not played by actors. Among other revelations, insurgents express their hostility in 2004 to Zarqawi as an obstacle to unity against the occupation but not as an impediment to the insurgency's popular growth. "So now," says an insurgent, "whether Zarqawi is captured dead or alive has no impact."

Bush's latest effort to foster belief in a "turning point" may trap him within his own psy-op. Unless Bush successfully includes the Sunnis in the political process and creates a new internationalized diplomacy, he will remain narrowly circumscribed by the consequences of his accumulated failures. Burdened by years of misjudgment, disinformation and delusion, Bush has again risked committing the blunder of raising expectations followed by deeper disillusionment within the "U.S. Home Audience."

If you haven't seen "The Battle of Algiers," rent it this weekend. The parallels are uncanny and I imagine the ending will be the same.