_____________
 
C O M M E N T A R Y
CHICAGO 
SUN-TIMES
TUESDAY
SEPTEMBER 14,
2004
 

PAGE 39 

By George, he's plotted 

JESSE JACKSON 
 
 
 
 
 
 

George Orwell would be ap-
______palled. The author of the 
_____classic 1984 wrote about the 
ability of totalitarian powers to con-
trol minds through propaganda. 
They could claim war is peace and 
repeat it enough that people came to 
believe it. Orwell never would have
 imagined that the same propaganda 
techniques could be so successful in 
a democracy with a free press -- but 
George Bush is proving just that.

__Bush has made his management 
of the war on terror the center-
piece of his campaign. His cam-
paign has only two messages: It 
paints Bush as steadfast in the war 
on terror and rips into John Kerry 
with an unending barrage of dis-
tortions, lies and slurs.
__To work, however, the Bush cam-
paign has to supplant reality with 
fiction. The inescapable reality is
 that Bush and his folks have dan-
gerously bollixed up the war on ter-
ror. Their decisions have left Amer-
ica more isolated, less admired and
 -- most important -- less safe.
  Before 9/11, the president's team 
scorned warnings about al-Qaida 
and Osama bin Laden. They were 
fixated on missile defense -- and on
 Iraq. So they simply didn't respond 
when the alarm bells went off.
  After 9/11, the illusions were 
shattered -- or should have been. 
With bipartisan support, the presi-.

dent went after bin Laden in 
Afghanistan. But from the first mo-
ment, his advisers were pushing for 
an attack on Iraq. Counterterrorist 
czar Richard Clarke was appalled. 
Iraq, he knew, had nothing to do 
with Sept. 11 and had no opera-
tional ties with bin Laden. And a 
war on Iraq, he warned, would be a 
distraction from the war on terror.
  But the war hawks hyped and 
helped invent the ''gathering 
threat'' of Saddam Hussein's 
weapons of mass destruction -- 
which did not exist. They touted 
the false information peddled by 
Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi bounder 
who was on the U.S. payroll. De-
fense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 
set up his own propaganda team in 
the Pentagon to challenge the 
skeptics.
  Everything the president said 
about the war turned out to be
__________
Orwell's Big Brother
could not have done
better.


false. Saddam had no ties to al-
Qaida. He possessed no weapons of 
mass destruction. He was totally 
contained. The Iraqi people did not 
greet us as liberators. Iraqi oil did 
not pay for the costs of occupation.
  Now, as Clarke feared, we are 
mired in a bloody quagmire in 
Iraq, at a cost that already exceeds 
1,000 American lives and is headed 
to $200 billion. But the real cost is 
far greater. In gearing up for the 
war, the Pentagon diverted troops 
and intelligence experts from 
Afghanistan, giving bin Laden and 
the Taliban time to regroup. Now 
we're told by our own intelligence
that al-Qaida is as big a threat as 
ever to the United States.
  Worse, the U.S. occupation of 
Iraq has roused fury across the Is-
lamic world. Admiration for Amer-
ica plummeted; hatred escalated. 
Bin Laden's popularity soared.
  Our military is overstretched 
and undermanned. Troops were 
dispatched into an occupation for 
which they had no training, no ap-
petite and, in too many cases, not 
even proper equipment.
  Illegal orders about torture and 
interrogation -- justified by the 
president's lawyers and embraced 
by Rumsfeld -- combined with 
overwhelmed and untrained prison 
guard troops to create the horrors of 
Abu Ghraib. The most outraged by 
these crimes are military leaders, 
who seek decent treatment for our 
own troops when they are captured.
  The president's folly has squan-
dered the global good will the 
United States enjoyed after Sept. 11. 
Instead of rallying the world to iso-
late terrorists and hunt them down, 
he has isolated the United States, 
even from our traditional allies.
  This is the worst foreign policy 
debacle since Vietnam, as con-
firmed by dozens of former officials 
from the Reagan and first Bush ad-
ministrations. Yet by the power of 
image and lies, this disastrous failed 
policy has become the centerpiece 
of Bush's bid for another term.
  With a cowed and passive press 
corps, and a scared and befuddled 
population, Bush plays on fears 
and turns folly into triumph. Or-
well's Big Brother could not have 
done better.
  But Americans had better take 
another look, because this country 
can little afford four more years of 
what Bush himself calls ''cata-
strophic victory.''