DEAD PARROT

Number 25 -- Saturday, May 17, 2003

FRIEDMAN AMONG THE SKULLS

Like Hamlet in the graveyard, Thomas Friedman knows an occasion for philosophy when he sees one. Friedman, the NY Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (don't forget: Henry Kissinger once won the Nobel, too), spent months dithering about the prospect of war in Iraq: to be, or not to be? His tortured rationalizations provided just the kind of cover that Bush & Co wanted--a steady, nattering background noise that would both keep public attention on the fabricated crisis and make "robust" action, when it came, seem like a relief. As a serviceable foil for the administration, his only rival was the UN Security Council.

Now, as he contemplates the Iraqi charnel house, Friedman's maundering continues. One would think that part of a journalist's training would be to resist the pull of a single sensational image and keep the big picture in view. But no: on the front page of his newspaper (4/25) Friedman sees a photo of a skull exhumed in Iraq, and he is off and running. The skull is that of an Iraqi political prisoner executed by Saddam Hussein. "As far as I'm concerned," Friedman writes (4/27), "we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue)...Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No Way."

For Friedman, the end justifies the means even when the means have required him to play the part of assiduous and enthusiastic gull. What if they did lie to me about those weapons of mass destruction, and what if I did compliantly repeat that Iraq was a serious threat to the security of the United States?--it was all in a good cause.

The exact "moral weight" of a skull is another question to be asked. Every skull, as Hamlet observes, "had a tongue in it and could sing once." Are some skulls nevertheless morally heavier than others? Could Friedman tell the difference between a skull produced by Saddam's torturers and one produced by American activities in Iraq over the past dozen years? To all appearances they would be much the same, chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade.

Even leaving aside as ancient history those killed in Gulf War I and by the subsequent sanctions, the pile of American-made skulls would be a high one, and our knowledge of just how high continues to expand despite the complete indifference of US civilian and military leadership and the only flickering interest of the news media. DP #22 noted the story of Kadhim Subhi, who had brought ten family members killed by American bombing to Najaf for burial. The Times (5/11) devotes a substantial story (albeit on p12) to another family, the Hamoodis of Basra, with double-digit losses. In an April 5 strike supposedly aimed at "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid (a face card in the US deck of bad guys), Abed Hamoodi, the 72-year-old patriarch of a well known Basra family, lost his wife, four children, and five grandchildren. He told reporter Marc Santora that 13 other people had been killed in neighboring houses.

Hamoodi is an affluent and westernized Iraqi, veteran of 45 years as a consultant in the oil industry. He initially welcomed the invasion and its promise of liberation. Now he considers the slaughter of his family to be a war crime and can scarcely believe that no representative of the British or Americans has come to apologize or explain. "How would President Bush feel if he had to dig his daughters from out of the rubble?" he asks. "All they have done," he says, "is create a graveyard."

Poor Thomas Friedman. Because he "balanced" his skulls column by mentioning the possibility (read: certainty) that Bush would use his "success" in Iraq to drive through a radical right-wing agenda at home, he got some negative email from right-wingers. "Conservative readers are bombing me," Friedman complained on 5/4. Abed Hamoodi might find the metaphor a bit forced.

DP REVIEWS

I first became aware of Karl Rove on election night 2000. The networks had called Florida for Gore, and my friends and I whooped and exchanged high-fives. Then a jowly Bush advisor appeared, scowling, to say the call was wrong; his side had other information. He sounded a little like Paulie Gualtieri responding to the news that someone was trying to muscle in on the North Jersey waste management business.

That Rove knew what he was talking about became evident as the hours and days went by. He is a man who can both count and calculate, and, even in a national election, his animus would drive him to carry these processes all the way down to the precinct level. Figure the number of Gore voters illegally scrubbed from the eligibility lists and the number of blacks turned aside by police in the backwaters of the panhandle. Figure a couple of million bucks for flying in a mob to disrupt the examination of the ballots. Figure that you can use Katherine Harris to stonewall an exact accounting and pay her off later with a congressional district. Figure that, if worst comes to worst, you own the Supreme Court. No question about it--your man is in.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), by James Moore and Wayne Slater, is not exactly a good book. It suffers from the scattering effect of the dual authorship and from a near-fatal addiction to portentous one-sentence paragraphs of the "They were heading off to make history" variety. The authors, two Texas reporters, have covered Bush and Rove for a long time but sometimes dissipate this advantage and deflect their story line by wandering off into the trackless sagebrush of the state's micropolitical history. An effort to rehabilitate two officials of the Texas Agriculture Department who did jail time for mixing political fundraising with department business seems particularly tangential. Though Rove, with the help of an FBI agent friend, may well have railroaded the men, their own moral brinksmanship makes them less than convincing victims and the episode reads like one more seamy skirmish in the waste management wars.

Still, Moore and Slater have an important and chilling story to tell, and they often tell it effectively. Rove plays for very high stakes, and at least until recently his aspirations have been more sharply focused than those of the man he mentors. In the words of a Rove colleague, "The president grew up dreaming of becoming Willie Mays. Karl grew up dreaming of becoming a presidential advisor." Not much chance that Little Georgie Whitebread of Midland would metamorphose into the Say Hey Kid, but Rove got exactly what he wanted, with enormous consequences for all of us. As the authors remark, "His influence marks a transcendent moment in American politics: the rise of an unelected consultant to a position of unprecedented power."

Born in 1950, Rove reached his political maturity (if that is the word for it) at the time of Watergate--an event he found inspirational. As executive director of the College Republicans, he traveled the country offering political seminars that included instruction in espionage and dirty tricks. The only lesson he drew from the foul-up at DNC headquarters was that you should be careful to avoid getting caught. When Rove's own campaign for the next higher office on the College Republican ladder became mired in credentials challenges and the curriculum at his seminars drew some skeptical notice in the Washington Post, the arbitrator who stepped in--on Rove's side-- was none other than George H. W. Bush. Within months, Bush had hired Rove as his special assistant.

As an independent consultant to Texas Republicans from the 80's on, Rove refined his operating principles. None of them is exactly original, but the single-minded ruthlessness with which he has adhered to them has carried his number-one client (who might have been happier fantasizing about basket catches and hook slides) to unlikely success in campaigns against such manifestly better-qualified opposition as Ann Richards, John McCain, and Al Gore. The major premises:

1) Keep the candidate on the high road, but don't ever forget about the low road. Rove has been remarkably successful at restraining Bush Jr.'s personal nastiness and making him look high-minded. Meanwhile, the whispering campaigns about Richards's surrender of state government to lesbians (Texas, 1994) and McCain's mental instability and illegitimate black child (South Carolina, 2000) did their work.

2) Build on stereotypes. In any contest between facts and fixed beliefs, the fixed beliefs will win. Because people assume that women (and especially liberal Democratic women) are "soft on crime," Rove chose crime as an issue against Richards, even though her record on it was strong.

3) Seize (or manufacture) the big moment--there won't be any followup. An earlier Texas gubernatorial race seemed to be slipping away from Rove's client, Bill Clements. Then, hours before a pivotal debate, investigators discovered a bug in Rove's office. In the ensuing brouhaha, the Democratic campaign lost its focus and momentum. Evidence strongly suggesting that Rove himself ordered the bug never took hold in the public consciousness.

4) Think in images. Verbal language is too slow and too vulnerable to analysis. Pictures go straight to the primitive centers of the brain. According to Rove, "You campaign as if America was watching TV with the sound turned down." Think windswept carrier deck. Think cheering sailors. Think don't-mess-with-America squint. Think helmet tucked jauntily under arm.

5) Poll like mad, but pretend you're interested only in principle. Polling can even be used to implant ideas in the electorate for later exploitation. If your pollster keeps asking (as Rove's did in February 2000) whether Al Gore would "say almost anything to get elected," Gore's supposed untrustworthiness will soon be in play. Then the candidate can begin to beat (as only Bush can and as he started doing in March) on the phrase "say anything to get elected."

6) Once you're in office, keep on running. In the old days, people ran and then, if they were successful, governed. Today the two phases have merged into a "permanent campaign," which, according to political theorist Sidney Blumenthal, "remakes government into an instrument designed to sustain an elected official's public popularity." Once this transformation is complete, all policy is politics. Both Bush's Brain and the daily news suggest that we're there.