The Ponzi Scheme Presidency
1/6/2009
If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here’s one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn’t help it. They just had to count.
In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnappings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it’s easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted, had they somehow been teleported into his world. True, his White House didn’t have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify); all it had was Saddam Hussein’s captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office. Almost 3,000 years later, however, Bush’s “scribes,” still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere.
Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American “success” was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon’s website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of “Taliban fighters” or, in Iraq, “terrorists,” the Air Force’s news feed listing the number of bombs dropped on “anti-Afghan forces,” or the U.S. Central Command’s stories of killing “Taliban militants.”
On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn’t repeat itself and – unlike the Assyrians – the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts.
Harold
