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Curious as to why I'd been reading so much about Iraq
lately, and specifically the need for the United States to
invade that country and force a regime change,
I
called my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, a
retired Army lieutenant colonel who now handles media
relations for the Committee That Really Runs America.
For a change, he was rather affable. I heard you're
hurting out there in flyover country -- aren't you in one
of those big square states out West, Coloming or Kanorado
or something like that? -- where it's dry and you're losing
jobs, things are going pretty well here.
And why was that?
Because in the year since the attacks on New York and
Washington, we've pulled off the transformation. Remember,
a year ago the big enemy was Osama bin Laden and his al
Qaeda network based in Afghanistan?
Indeed I remembered, and pointed out that good Americans were now supposed to start salivating at the prospect of going to war with Iraq.
That's right,
he agreed. That's the
transformation I was talking about. Saddam Hussein hasn't
so much as said 'boo' to the United States for years.
There's no real evidence he had any connection with the
attacks on Sept. 11. And yet, as part of the popular War on
Terror, we'll go after Saddam.
Didn't we try this once before, back in 1991?
That's one of your problems, Quillen. You remember
too much.
Ziegler sighed. Now you're going to bring
up how Bush the Elder couldn't figure out why we had to go
to war with Saddam then. It was oil, or jobs, or the
territorial integrity of Kuwait, or the fabrication that
Iraqi soldiers were ripping babies out of
incubators.
And at some point then, Saddam was worse than
Hitler.
So if that was true, why didn't we take him out
then? It isn't like the Allied armies stopped at the
eastern border of France after the D-Day invasion, or the
Red Army halted at the Vistula River. When they had a real
Hitler, they got rid of him.
Ziegler stopped my rant. Let's just call that some
presidential hyperbole, and leave it at that,
he said.
You can't visit the sins of the father on the
son.
Fair enough, I agreed. But why all the current emphasis on Iraq?
It's so simple that even some podunk journalist like
you should have figured it out by now. We want people to
stare at Iraq so they won't be glancing somewhere else,
especially before the midterm elections.
Did he mean that if the President kept talking about Iraq, people wouldn't notice that the economy is going into the tank?
You got it. Do you know how much that hurt when the
President gave his speech about cleaning up corporate
corruption, and behind him the stock ticker showed the
market going down? We had to get people's minds off
that.
That made sense. So what did the Committee do?
We started early this year, changing the status of
Navy Lt. Commader Michael S. Speicher. He was shot down
over Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991 at the start of the Gulf War,
and was classified as killed in action. But we arranged to
change his status to missing in action, with the
implication that he's being held prisoner by Saddam. When
the time comes, we'll have the material to create a sense
of national outrage at Iraq.
It pays to think ahead, and I commended Ziegler. He had other examples.
Try this one, Quillen. Some minor thug got himself
arrested on May 8 at an airport. We kept it quiet then.
About a later, on June 11, when there were all sorts of
obnoxious questions about Dick Cheney at Halliburton and
George W. Bush at Harken Energy and their connections to
Enron, we release the news of the arrest of Jose Padilla
and how he was going to build and detonate a dirty bomb
somewhere in our country. That sure shoved Hawken and
Halliburton out of the news.
That was clever, and Ziegler had more to say.
Now with the UN speech, and the demand for Congress
to pass a resolution before the election, who's thinking
about Tyco, Qwest, WorldComm, Adelphia, or the next
corporate scandal?
He had a point. By the rules of objective journalism, journalists are just supposed to report what happens, not what they think should be happening.
Precisely. And as long as the Committee can arrange
the events, so that attention is focused on Iraq, then you
journalists will have to deal with that, instead of all
those scandals.
But what happens after the election? Will we invade Iraq then, or was this all just a hustle so we wouldn't pay attention to anything else?
That's for us to know, Quillen. There's only so much
I can tell you.
He hung up.
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