Five Hundred and One American Nights
(White House Strategy Session
- early September, 2007)
The president was concerned. Only five hundred days, give or take, left in his presidency and his beloved war was under ruthless attack by rabid peaceniks. He knew there was no chance that the war would ever be successful, of course, but he was still afraid to think that it might be discontinued before his term ended because he would be bereft without it. After all, he was the war president – a self fulfilling prophesy in his case if there ever was one.
He mused to his advisors, what can I do? I’ve told every story I can think of to distract the people from the obvious in order to keep the obscure in place and the war going. The people are bored and surly, the Congress, though notorious doormats and piss posts, are even starting to get restless.
I’ve got what, like five hundred days left? And one, you say? OK, then, I’ve got to string this out as best I can for five hundred and one lousy days more. I need more slogans and I need them fast if I’m going to keep the public fooled. This will be my greatest triumph. What did Lincoln say, “you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Well dammit, call me crazy but I think I can fool enough of the people at least a little more of the time, say five hundred and one days more. That’s all I need. That should be nothing after four friggin years of this, you know what I’m saying?
He pulled down his great rolodex of revolving rationales from the shelf. He pulled back the curtain to expose the great turning wheel of endless useless excuses mounted on the wall. And he started to thumb irritatedly through his notes and highlights of speeches past, all his reasons for war and for continuing it grouped by category. He flipped through the pages at random and recounted some highlights.
How horrible would it be if Iraq attacked us with nuclear weapons, he read aloud, mushroom shaped clouds, et al, ooh, that was a good one, scary. But perhaps not so credible now, at least as far as Iraq goes, since it never had nukes or any means of acquiring any to begin with. I knew that whole red herring of Saddam trying to acquire yellow cake in Niger could only carry us so far particularly when it was all a bunch of hooey. Besides yellow cake sounds so benign, like something you would cater for a kid’s party or something. Personally I thought we should have said Saddam was scarfing down all the devil’s food he could lay his hands on, cause it sounds creepier, devil’s food from the dark continent, oooh, that would have kept the kids awake at night.
Then there was the whole weapons of mass destruction thing, that was perfect until we actually had to produce them which to me seems an unreasonable high standard to hold people like us to. And the concept of nexus, nexus was great, the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda meeting in Iraq, that was cool, except that neither of the two ingredients that would have been nexusing there were actually ever there to nexus. But I really liked that word nexus, anyway. And then there’s that whole business of Saddam dying to invade us and attack us in our own beds at night, raping our women and daughters which we just tried to subtlely lay in between the lines by in-fer-ence.
(Those familiar with the Presidential style know that he often over-enunciated particular words syllable by syllable either when he was afraid he couldn’t pronounce them properly or when he thought he was talking down to someone less intelligent than he was (i.e. the public). Although, at this late date even in his crony filled administration, finding credulous listeners less intelligent than him was becoming a more and more difficult thing to do.)
And naturally there’s 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, as our constant refrain, a little like the back up singers in a bad doo-wop group, 9/11 is our background noise like shoobie doobie do or do wap do wah or something. 9/11, here we go again, that’s a date so nice you have to say it twice, or hundreds of times, and it still has legs. I don’t know exactly why. Probably because I’ve repeated it so many times my tongue has begun to formulate it automatically, I say it in my sleep. The way they used the “old bloody flag” after the Civil War or “remember the Alamo” or the “Lusitania” we wave the old bloody flag of 9/11 in place of having to ever have a real policy in order to con-tin-u-ate* a bad one. I know you’ll laugh, but in my early speeches, Saddam Hussein and 9/11 were paired together so often, for a while I thought 9/11 must be his middle name, some kind of nickname or Islamic thing, I figured, like me being George Bush II or old 43 or something.
Or sometimes in my speeches I envisioned bin Laden - though he was the evil whose name we dared not speak for fear it would remind everybody that we let him get away - and Saddam were like twins, separated at birth but still one and the same. Physiologically and geographically and temperamentally this would be very difficult to imagine but psychologically the image was very potent stuff. A lot of people bought into that one hook, line and sinker. Some of them are still up on the bank flopping around like big old sturgeons with the hooks still in their gullets and the shocked look still frozen in their eyes.
And of course, there’s always al Qaeda itself since, thanks to Iraq, they are still on the loose and on the rise, that name still strikes fear into the heart, don’t it? Al Qaeda, 9/11, Iraq, those three are all still money, aren’t they? That’s our bread and butter play. There’s a kind of nexus there. That’s the inside straight we have to draw to. An axis of evil in the mind nexusing like mad in Iraq and that is what the war is about, isn’t it, something like that? What do you think? That’s what we’ve got to keep selling like bad life insurance, over and over, isn’t it?
And then, naturally, we had the big Kahuna, the giant enchilada, the mushroom shaped cloud image. When Condi said that if we didn’t attack Saddam in a hurry and rush without planning, purpose, rhyme or reason into irrational war, “the next smoking gun we see in Iraq might be a mushroom shaped cloud,” man that was cold, great, classic scare tactics. That’s leadership, you know, leadership and fright go hand in hand. We terrorized our own people with the word terror, until they were like putty in my hands. If we had said we wanted to attack the Maldives because the Maldivinians were fixing to attack us, I think we coulda. So don’t belittle fear, my friends, that’s been the cornerstone my faltering presidency has been erected on.
It’s always been about the whole fear thing, hasn’t it? Fear of terror, terrified of terror, fear of this, fear of that, fear of fear itself. Weakness in our weak minds is not being afraid enough, or at least as afraid as we are. Or, in other words, bravery is really weakness. And fear is our nexus between hysteria and policy. Fear is good for great leadership and for what ails poor poll numbers. Be afraid, be very afraid… that’s the line, that’s the stock in trade of great leadership. But you know it’s getting tougher today… bravery’s on the rise across the land, fear’s declining. The nation’s getting its nerve back. It’s a pity, isn’t it, but I’m taking it as my job, as my new resolve, to tamp this freedom and clear thinking back down again before this destructive resurgence of reason, constitutional law and courage can start to catch on again among the people of the United States.
Think this is too negative? Too harsh? But then there are all those positive things I preached. Remember? Like democracy, for a time I beat that one to death with a stick, remember? Democracy here, democracy there and democracy everywhere. Course it didn’t quite catch on. And elections in Iraq, tried that too. That held the public’s attention in check for a time. And then everything that was supposed to happen after that, that whole spread of democracy through the region thingy, like a reverse domino, you know, never quite dominoed. You know?
This is how I always thought about that. Ever see one of those guys that put all the dominos in a row, flick the one at the end and then watch them all knock each other over in sequence? Well my policy was to show that film in reverse, where all those little dominos, these undemocratic countries, started standing up one after another. That was sweet, I could almost see that one, visualize it in my mind. Now if we could just run the video tape of Iraq backwards in our minds maybe we could just eliminate the war altogether, that’d sure help us out. And why not? In our world, or at least in our own minds, perception is more real than reality, you know it?
But that regional transformation theory never quite caught on either. Mainly because the region never got transformed and all those damn legions of dominoes just keep falling over fast as we get them stood up.
And then there are all those other little temporary theories I used from time to time to get us from one week to another. Some of those are still good, if people forget I’ve already used them before, maybe we can change a few words and use them again.
Like the perfidy of the press. Remember when we all said that the war was going great it was just the evil press that wasn’t reporting it because they are all a bunch of lazy leftists. Fox news was the only one in the journalistic hen house that got it right but that’s only because they didn’t have any reporters in Iraq to get it wrong. It seemed to help their clarity of journalistic vision a lot if we just told them what to say. And they did too. Still do.
But heck it seems we played the hell out of that, biased journalists picking on us honest politicians, for years, it seemed like. I like how we always turn things on their head, you know? How we play with opposites, that’s brash man, cold. I call it trans-po-si-tion-al pol-i-tics - though everyone else, cynics, just call it lying – you know exchanging something true in the peoples’ mind with something untrue, generally its complete opposite, by continuous repetition?
Like how we take something as fundamental and necessary to liberty as freedom of the press and explain how it is really evil and oppressive and should be stamped out. While, on the other hand, oppressive, secretive, dishonest, incompetent government which has always been thought to be the evil we must avoid, is now exactly what the nation needs to preserve freedom. Therefore, the constitutional right to voluntarily give up our freedom shall never be infringed by those traitors who would protect our freedoms from infringement. Damn those ACLUers.
Or take the obvious fact that we’ve screwed everything up in Iraq and then claim how this really means we’re winning, you know? I like how we do that. Or how we invaded Iraq for no conceivable reason and now have to stay because we can’t afford to lose that thing which was never there for us to win in the first place. Now it doesn’t get any slicker than that. And it was the same principle we used with the scientists and global warming. If it wasn’t for all that damn melting ice, I think we’d still be getting away with that one.
But you know we tried to play those opposite cards, these trans-po-si-tion-al politics, right up through the last election, and it seems like maybe we finally over played our hand some, cause the people finally began to see through that trick and voted some of our guys home in a hurry.
I even said absolutely in that election! Remember how just days before the election when I said, yes we’re winning in Iraq, absolutely, I said! As I’ve told you before, I never lie to the people, except when I have to or when I really feel like it. But then only when I feel it’s really necessary. And then I lie heavily. I do not take this lightly at all. The results of an unrefuted lie in politics is like the dead weight of a lifeless body the body politic has to lug along with it on its back from that time on. So I lie purposefully or not at all. I take my job serious.
But man, I have to tell you, things are getting pretty bad when I throw out an absolutely lie and exaggerate like mad then wrap it all up in a big package of fears named and unnamed and tell the people to shut up and just trust me and they still don’t buy it? Man, I put my entire credibility on the line like that and they still don’t believe me? I’m telling you, you know you’re in trouble when over generalized fear-mongering oversimplifications cease to suffice to fool the public any longer, know what I mean?
But by the way since we’re on the topic, I think the best and my favorite tall tale of all, was when things kept going from bad to worse in Iraq, and worse to awful, and awful to godawful, and then got even worse after that; how we told them the violence and bombings and deaths were a good sign of progress because it showed how afraid the enemy was that we were just about to win! Man, I had a good laugh over that. Imagine, we must be close to winning because we look to be so near to losing control! Man that’s rich as Croesus. Have we got some creative little spinners around here or what? Shameless, that’s what that is. That’s what I mean by running against the grain of the truth by playing the opposite of truth for facts. That’s what I mean by trans-po-si-tion-al, saying and doing things so exactly opposite the truth that they almost begin to make a kind of weird sense out of our inbred belief that nobody could ever be that wrong about everything accidentally as frequently as we are on purpose.
But these reversals of fact, these little lies, are a little like murders in the mind, a little bit of you dies along the way each time, so we must be doubly strong if we are to continue to maintain them. An intentional lie in the echoing marble halls of government is like a small homicide. It eats at your credibility a bit. Heck, it eats at the marble a little bit. In Iraq, I’m telling you guys, we’ve been serial killers, you know it. But we’ve gotten away with it so far. Just five hundred and one days more, I’m telling you I think it can be done. Rally round boys, wrap yourselves in the flag, better to keep things hidden, we’re so close. I think we can still fool most of the people just enough of the time to squeak through to the end, current policies intact.
Man those were the heady days, though weren’t they? Now nobody believes me so much anymore. I loved those days of the dead enders, and the wildly irresponsible fear mongering we all engaged in, and talk of mushroom shaped clouds when it could still mean something and the vision of the spreading democracy thing, or my “mission accomplished” moment, like I was a great military mastermind or something. Remember I said that on the deck of the old Abe – you can’t fool all the people all the time – Lincoln himself. Well I’ve almost managed it, haven’t I? In any case, however you cut it and lay it out, for a moment there I was sure a whole lot bigger than my daddy ever was when he was president, that’s for sure.
But now all we’ve got left is all these little esoteric talking points like political reconciliation, oil sharing laws and top down democracy turning into bottom up democracy. And regionalism and provinces and Sunni and Shia and Kuds and Mahdi armies and Kurds and I don’t know who all. And don’t even get me started on Ah-ma-di- ni-ji-had (he slowly read this last name off a piece of paper in his pocket). I don’t understand how all these funny foreign people got all wrapped in my war in the first place. And now I can’t get them out. My whole grand glorious war was going so well, good vs. evil and all that, and now it’s all gone gray and peculiar and it’s all just death and waste and hard to understand and crap.
So here we are talking inside baseball, small change, warm beer and bad politics, about breathing space and bottom up regional security, while we stand down as they stand up or up as they fall down or something , and this new thing, this weird “return on success” slogan I’m stuck with now, what’s that even mean? It hurts my head just thinking about it. None of it has any sweep or majesty to it any longer. I return things to the store when they don’t work not when they do. And if there’s no success then we’ll stay forever and a day or to the twelfth of never. Or for at least 501 days. The amazing thing is that stuff like this has actually allowed us to keep this insufferable little war going now into its fifth year. Amazing.
So that brings me back to what I was talking about before. And I mean man that whole “surge” thing really almost put us into the old trick bag didn’t it? Nearly trapped us in it, didn’t it? We just about painted ourselves into a corner there, you know it? I mean those benchmarks things actually meant that we might have to show some progress somewhere, sometime at something. Fortunately it looks like we’re going to be able to fake our way through that one more time. God knows we’ve been lucky to find compliant generals along the way more interested in being my buddy than in the welfare of their troops. But I’m telling you those benchmarks almost snookered us into having to some day leave Iraq because of course none of those things has the least forlorn prayer of ever getting met the way things are going now.
But I like what we do and what we’ve done, because the surge was always only meant to be temporary, but when we end it we’re going to call it a troop draw down. Like we’ve actually won something here rather than just continue to tread water, dog paddle style, until we drown. Man, that’s neat. Here we go again. See, we’re still on our game. Actually we aren’t doing anything at all in Iraq but stay the course we’ve always been on. Damn the icebergs, full speed ahead goes the Titanic. Last one off gets to be the next captain and if I can help it it sure as hell isn’t going to be me. Let the next guy go down with the ship, not I.
Course most people won’t buy our little subterfuge here, but Republicans always do. Heck I could tell them the sun’s the moon and the moon’s a hole in the ground and the hole in their head is their rear end and they wouldn’t know the diff. Or care. They even bought into the whole Viet Nam comparison nonsense I spun as if that wasn’t completely surreal. I mean to suggest after nine years and 58,000 dead Americans when we hadn’t furthered our diplomatic position in Viet Nam one iota, to allege that we should have stayed longer rather than left sooner? Man, that was bold, I’d have to say. But I agree with you guys that I oughta dump that reference. It seems to have a limited u-til-i-ty. We’ll only pull that one out at gatherings of hard core dead ender Republicanos.
In fact, most Republicans still think, or pretend to think to pollsters, that Iraq was behind 9/11. Thank God they are as dense as they are or we might really be in jeopardy here of actually having to win or leave this war. It proves the old adage: I wouldn’t want to lead anybody but somebody who’d be dumb enough to vote for someone dumb as me in the first place. Not only do they gets what they gets, they gets what they paid for and they get exactly what they deserve, which means my conscience is clean.
So now here we are, coming round the bend and I can see the home stretch from here. 501 American nights left, that’s all. I’m sure I can spin it out that far. Cheney and his war monger buddies think we might actually have to manufacture another war against Iran to strengthen our case for continuing the war in Iraq. Interesting idea, tempting. We could shift blame for our inability to get things done in Iraq and say it was Iran’s fault rather than ours, sweet. That’d fix my critics, those damn democrats and those lousy Americans who’ve turned against me. They don’t trust me? Well, I’ll give ‘em something to not trust me for. They whimper at Iraq? See how they’ll like a real crisis when the whole area’s at war. They want my job so bad, how are they going to like Armageddon to kick off a democrat presidency? That’ll be my bequest to them when they get this job, a shambles, a mess. We did all the fun stuff in my term – ran up the deficit, started a couple of wars, let everything grow worse through severe mismanagement and devout inattention, cut our own taxes, took a lotta vacations, etc. – now let ‘em have it, I say. Let’s see them clean up after me. Serves ‘em right. Screw this country, love me or leave me, that’s my motto.
Anyway, I’m running out of things to say, I am really at a loss. Let’s see, I’m down to my last letters in the rolodex of shame here and these are pretty much losers too. Under “v” I got “victory”. Yeah, like anybody’s going to believe that anymore. Under “w” there’s W of course, that’s me, but also “winning”, same problem as “v” and WMD’s, another long gone loser. “x” marks an “x” through the whole damn deal. “y” sounds too much like why?. God knows we don’t want any questions asked about any aspect of this fiasco. Then there’s “z”, zilch, nada, nothing more. Zero. The end. Which wouldn’t you know brings us back to “a” again where I’ve written in “absolutely”. Well, we know how that turned out. See, nothing here boys. Nothing new, we’re about half screwed, you know it?
So I guess I’ll just use 9/11, al Qaeda and terrorists et al, you know fear of what’ll happen next. Same old spiel. I’ll repeat these like a mantra a thousand times, and say we need to stay in Iraq mainly to partly clean up the mess that we’ve made in Iraq since we arrived. Think how horrible it’ll be if we ever leave, I’ll opine. We gotta win, something or other, da, da, da, trot out the usual suspects. We always listen to the generals, to general uh, Petraeus, what’s his name, our new Colin. And I’ll hit the fear mongering button nonstop, the fear mongering’ll never stop, it’s always good, like there’s no tomorrow. They’ll call us losers if we quit. The democrats, I mean the terrorists will win, etc, etc, etc. Hee hee, now I sound like Yul Brynner in the King of Siam or something. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Man this stuff’s getting thin though. Somehow I gotta make it sizzle and pop to get through my last five hundred and one days at war, because I’m the war president.
So stand back boys, here we go again. Let’s spin the giant wheel of misfortune once more, and see what combination of excuses and fright mongering nonsense we can invent this time. Ah, OK, here’s one. “If we don’t’ stay in Iraq angry Iraqis will follow us home and attack us here.” OK that’s a good one. It’s a bit of a whopper but what else is new? (He gave the mighty wheel another great spin.) Oh OK, and “if we don’t finish the mess we’ve started we’ll only have to come back later, in five years say (?) and start this war all over again.” Yeah, right, as if we ever would.
OK, now we’re cooking. I’m starting to feel the fervor, the adrenaline rush, remember guys only 501 days left! Sit back and enjoy the magic, Shazam – I mean, She-her-a-zade! If we keep us in Iraq for 501 nights more I win! Too bad the country will never be able to share in my great personal victory, but if I win they can’t. If I win they still lose.
