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.''