Baghdad Bobs everywhere

Remember Baghdad Bob, the comedic bad guy you just had to love. Well DC Media Girl does.

Remember Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf? No, you say? Actually you do -- he's otherwise known as "Baghdad Bob". Ah, the good old days, when day after day on CNN we'd watch the hapless Iraqi Information Minister blather out spin and disinformation so preposterous that it was actually kind of endearing. Oh, how we laughed and laughed at Baghdad Bob's statements, so divorced from reality.

Well she has also noticed that we have plenty of Baghdad Bobs right here in the good old US of A. For some examples she directs us over to Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect.

And, in the information age, an administration can't, and doesn't, market alone. It takes an army of salespeople -- it takes a village, you might say -- to accentuate the positive. And when an administration spreads demonstrable lies and falsehoods, or offers "evidence" that can't be wholly refuted but for which there is nevertheless no existing proof, it takes that same army to stand up and say: "Yes! These assertions are true! Those who deny them are unpatriotic, or simpletons, or both! And finally, when the war goes terribly, terribly wrong, that same army is called to the ramparts one last time, to say, in a fashion that approaches Soviet-style devotion: "Things are in fact going well! The insurgency is dying! Abu Ghraib is not a scandal! Saddam Hussein did have ties to al-Qaeda; you just don't know it yet!" And so on.

For its war in Iraq, the Bush administration relied on and benefited from the cheerleading of a group of pundits and public intellectuals who, at every crucial moment, subordinated the facts on the ground to their own ideological preferences and those of their allies within the administration. They refused to hold the administration's conduct of the war and the occupation to the ideals that they themselves professed, or simply to the standard of common sense. They abdicated their responsibilities as political intellectuals -- and, more elementally, as reliable empiricists.

In other words it takes a village of Baghdad Bobs. He goes on to name a few.

Baghdad Bill Kristol

Since 1998, it's been Weekly Standard Editor Kristol who's argued most persistently that getting rid of Saddam Hussein should be the central goal of U.S. foreign policy. So even before the debris of 9-11 had settled, Kristol -- like his longtime neoconservative compatriot Paul Wolfowitz, and, indeed, like the president himself -- saw an opportunity to take the coming war to Iraq. "I think Iraq is, actually, the big unspoken elephant in the room today," Kristol said on National Public Radio's All Things Considered the day after the attacks. "There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past."

In the months following the attack, Kristol wrote and spoke about Hussein's arsenal with exquisite attention to detail, however fictitious those details were to prove. On NPR's Talk of the Nation that October, for instance, he said, "We know that over the last three or four weeks, he has moved many of his chemical and biological weapons programs in preparation for possible U.S. attacks."

As intra-administration battles raged among the hawks in the Pentagon and the more cautious voices at the CIA and the State Department, Kristol seized every opportunity to undermine the credibility of those who failed to appreciate that Hussein was the source of all danger. On November 19, 2001, he and his sometimes co-author Robert Kagan wrote, "Iraq is the only nation in the world, other than the United States and Russia, to have developed the kind of sophisticated anthrax that appeared in the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. What will it take for the FBI and the CIA to start connecting the dots here? A signed confession from Saddam?" Whatever else Kristol and Kagan may be, the heirs to Holmes and Watson they are not.

Baghdad Tom Friedman

A neoliberal rather than a neoconservative, Friedman never drank all the Kool-Aid. But he was a vital -- perhaps the vital -- enabler of the war, because from his Times perch, he convinced many a reader (elite and layperson alike) who never would have been persuaded by the likes of Kristol that the war needed to be fought.

[.....]

Even after Baghdad fell, Friedman still viewed the merits of his own model occupation as the main story, while the emerging absurdities of the administration's war were just so much distraction. On June 4, 2003, he wrote, "The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now." As time went by, Friedman finally realized that all was folly. "What is inexcusable is [the administration] thinking that such an experiment would be easy, that it could be done on the cheap, that it could be done with any old army and any old coalition... . That is the foolishness of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. My foolishness was thinking they could never be so foolish."

Friedman's foolishness seems rooted in an almost willed ignorance of the figures in the Bush administration and the worldviews that defined them.

He fails to mention my favorite, Baghdad Dick Cheney. Cheney never gave up the idea that WMD was present in Iraq and that Saddam was somehow responsible for 911. Most recently, as all hell was breaking loose in Iraq, he told us the insurgency was in it's last throes.