Bush’s press conference: evasions, lies and a promise of more bloodletting

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/bush-a15.shtml

By Barry Grey

15 April 2004

President Bush’s Tuesday night prime-time news conference was a bizarre
and repugnant spectacle. After hiding out for a week at his Texas ranch,
while his military forces attacked men, women and children in Iraqi cities
with war planes, helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery—killing and
wounding thousands—and the death toll of American soldiers soared, Bush
came before the television cameras in an attempt to reassure a shaken
ruling elite and stem a growing tide of popular discontent.

The political backdrop of Iraqi popular resistance and homicidal US
reprisals was compounded by the mounting evidence emanating from three
weeks of public hearings by the commission appointed to investigate the
September 11 hijack-bombings of government negligence, if not outright
complicity, in the terrorist attacks. Bush came before the American public
dripping in blood from the colonial occupation of Iraq and accused by his
own former counter-terrorism chief of having ignored the threat of an Al
Qaeda attack within the US, and then seizing on the tragedy as the pretext
for implementing long-standing plans to invade and occupy the Persian Gulf
country.

Even by the dismal standard of Bush’s previous few and far-between
encounters with the press, Tuesday night’s performance was a miserable
farce. There was the usual catalogue of inanities and lies, but this time
they were delivered by a haggard and distracted little man who repeatedly
lost his train of thought, forgot the questions to which he was
responding, and got lost in the twists and turns of rambling and evasive
answers.

Sensing weakness, the normally supine White House press corps felt
emboldened to ask more pointed questions, and the hapless president could
do little more than rack his brain to come up with the set phrases with
which his coaches had prepped him in advance of the press conference.

Given the violent and reckless thrust of US foreign policy, the resulting
spectacle was more ominous than amusing.

In a 17-minute opening statement, Bush laid out the familiar framework of
platitudes and lies his administration—and the entire political
establishment—have used to justify the colonial subjugation of the Iraqi
people. Combining the technique of the “big lie” that was the stock-in-
trade of Nazi propaganda with the linguistic innovations of George
Orwell’s “newspeak,” Bush declared that the US military occupation was the
embodiment of freedom and liberty, while those Iraqis who were prepared to
give their lives fighting foreign domination were criminals, enemies of
civilization, and terrorist thugs.

Bush ignored the plain facts of recent events in Iraq, where tens of
thousands of impoverished workers, Sunni and Shiite alike, have taken to
the streets and thousands more have taken up arms to defend themselves and
their families from arbitrary searches, arrests and killings, and to
demand that the American military get out of their country. The US
president declared that this eruption of resistance was “not a popular
uprising.” It was, he said, a “power grab” by “extreme and ruthless
elements,” whom he proceeded to link—without a shred of evidence—to major
attacks of the past two decades, from the 1983 bombing of the Marine
barracks in Lebanon, to 9/11, to last month’s terror bombing of commuter
trains in Madrid.

What is the content of this “freedom” that Bush claims the US is ordained
to dispense—with missiles, bullets, and concentration camps—to the masses
of the world, and which he called the gift of “God Almighty?” It is the
freedom of the American corporate and financial elite to seize territories
and ruthlessly exploit cheap labor and strategic natural resources, such
as oil.

In another example of Washington “newspeak,” Bush pledged to keep to his
June 30 deadline to transfer “sovereignty” back to the Iraqi people. When
asked, in the question-and-answer period, to whom precisely the US would
hand over nominal political power, Bush admitted he did not know. That, he
said, would be “figured out” by the United Nations envoy dispatched by
Washington to work out the details of an interim government.

This, however, was clearly a secondary detail, since the “sovereign”
government would be vetted by the US and would preside at the pleasure of
the US military, which would continue to occupy the country for an
indefinite period. Real power on the ground in Iraq would, in any event,
reside in the hands of the US ambassador, who would shortly be named by
Bush to hold court in a 3,000-strong fortified embassy in Baghdad.

This colonialist framework went unchallenged at the press conference—not
surprisingly, since there is no disagreement within the American ruling
elite and both of its parties—Democratic as well as Republican—with the
basic imperialist goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Nor are there any moral qualms over the use of massive American firepower
to kill and bludgeon the Iraqis into submitting to US domination. In the
post-mortems on the press conference, the most bloodthirsty parts of
Bush’s presentation escaped criticism—namely, his pledge to increase the
US military presence and use “decisive force” to maintain order. This was
said even as thousands of US Marines were massing outside of Najaf, Sadr
City in Baghdad, and Fallujah in preparation for new, and more brutal
attacks on the insurgent populations.

The divisions and conflicts within the establishment arise over the
optimum political and diplomatic means to achieve the desired goals, and
the competency of the Bush administration to get the job done.

Hence the hand-wringing of the New York Times, which complained in an
April 14 editorial that Bush’s “responses to questions were distressingly
rambling and unfocused.” The media reporter for the Washington Post, Tom
Shales, made the apt observation that in his opening speech, Bush “never
stressed any particular point or added any emphasis.” Shales
continued: “He might as well have been reading letters off an eye chart.”

The Post reporter quoted NBC TV journalist David Gregory, who was among
the questioners in the East Room of the White House, saying the president
was “filibustering at times” with his rambling responses. Bush, Shales
went on to say, “at times appeared to be teetering on the very brink of
confusion.”

Even more indicative of the mounting crisis of the Bush administration was
the verdict of William Kristol, publisher of the Republican right Weekly
Standard and one of the Iraq war’s most vocal proponents. “I was
depressed,” Kristol told the Post. “He didn’t explain how we are going to
win there.”

Citing Bush’s responses to questions on the composition of the post-June
30 interim government in Iraq (“That’s what [UN envoy] Mr. Brahimi is
doing”) and the need for more US troops to put down the insurgency (Bush
deferred the decision to General John Abizaid of the US Central Command),
Kristol said, “These two statements are in my mind a failure of
presidential leadership.”

There was, in fact, little in Bush’s performance to reassure the ruling
elite. Some of his lies were so crude as to invite ridicule. For example,
in the course of a meandering response to a pointed question about what
the reporter called the “false premises” of the US attack on Iraq—
including the absence of weapons of mass destruction—Bush lapsed into one
of his standard—and by now thoroughly discredited—fictions. “The United
Nations passed a Security Council resolution unanimously that said, disarm
or face serious consequences. And he refused to disarm.” (Emphasis added).

In response to a question about the now-declassified and published
Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001, which bore the
title, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” Bush reiterated the absurd
claim that the warning of impending terrorist attacks on the US mainland
was “mainly history” and did not contain “anything new.” In the course of
his response, he noted the extraordinary security precautions taken at the
Group of 8 summit held less than three weeks before the August 6 PDB, and
said the threat warnings surrounding that event had prompted him to ask
questions about possible terrorist threats within the US.

He concluded by saying, “[H]ad I had any inkling whatsoever that the
people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved
heaven and earth to save the country...”

Unfortunately for Bush, the most striking security precaution taken at the
G-8 summit, as has been widely reported, was the decision to shut down air
space around Genoa in order to preempt reported terrorist schemes to
hijack airplanes and fly them into the summit!

By the end of the question-and-answer period, Bush’s responses were
growing increasingly incoherent. Asked what he considered his biggest
mistake after 9/11, the president had what can fairly be described as
a “Captain Queeg” moment. Here is a portion of his reply:

“I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could
plan for it... You know, I just—I’m sure something will pop into my head
here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of
trying to come up with answer, but it hadn’t yet...

“See, I’m of the belief that we’ll find out the truth on the weapons.
That’s why we set up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing
the truth as to exactly where they are. They could still be there. They
could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm...

“I hope—I don’t want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I’m confident
I have. I just haven’t—you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m
not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.”

In this babble of disorientation and reaction, one got a chilling glimpse
of the toxic moral, political and intellectual state of the American
ruling elite, and the profound crisis that drives its violent bid for
world domination. Working people are obliged, if they are to avoid a
catastrophe, to take heed and draw the necessary political conclusions.

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