All of this seems based upon the premise that for the last four years, we have had a strategy of simply leaving "Al Qaeda" in peace, just letting them be. But now, we have a new Commander, Gen. David G. Petraeus, who has dramatically embraced a bold, innovative, new strategy: "Let's get Al Qaeda." That, in turn, is what accounts for the rhetorical shift.
But that explanation is just ridiculous on its face, particularly in light of how many times we have heard in the past that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, that we have disrupted it ability to operate, that we have decapitated its leadership, through all of our highly successful offensive Iraqi actions against them. And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").
More importantly, all of this depends upon an underhanded and deceitful conflation of (a) the Iraqi Sunnis who decided to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as they battled against the U.S. occupation of their country, and (b) the "Al Qaeda" led by Osama bin Laden which flew planes into U.S. buildings on 9/11. In every way that matters, those two entities are universes apart. But for obvious reasons, the political consequences of equating them are enormous. To conflate them is, as I said on Saturday, misleading and propagandistic in the extreme. For one article after the next to bolster that conflation is so journalistically irresponsible that it is hard to put into words.
But let us focus on the underlying and most significant point of all of this. This sudden shift in describing the "enemy" in Iraq as "Al Qaeda" is the by-product of a very familiar information-producing system: namely, the administration formulates narratives, the President announces them, his top officials and military commanders recite them endlessly, and then establishment "journalists" not only write them down, but rely exclusively -- and uncritically -- on those narratives to report events. As I noted on Saturday, particularly in the Update citing the work of other bloggers who have been tracking this rhetorical shift for several months, this is exactly how the transformation of the "War in Iraq" into the newly unveiled "U.S. War Against Al Qeada" was manufactured and disseminated.
Whatever else is true, all of these new reports about the glorious victories we are achieving against "Qaeda fighters" in Iraq are the by-product of this exact system. These reports rely exclusively, or overwhelmingly, on the claims of military commanders selected by the Bush administration to communicate "information" to the media.
The longer the war goes on, the more postmodern it becomes, and the more simulated and Baudrillardian the reality of the war becomes for the consumers of these narratives: the American people. Whatever the reality is for the Iraqis and the soldiers, we are being distanced from it, removed from it. The rhetorical shift is cynical, and conservapedia-esque in its hostility toward fact.
As Baudrillard wrote after the first Gulf War:
The question is not whether one is for or against the war, but whether one is for or against the reality of war. Analysis must not be sacrificed to the expression of anger. It must be directed against reality, against manifestness -- here against the manifest reality of this war.Like the WMDs before them, this new enemy does not exist. If the administration and the complicit media continue down this path, the war itself will cease to exist. It will all be an illusion. The war is no longer about fighting and defeating an enemy. It is about manipulating the perception of a war to deter us from understanding what is happening on the ground in Iraq and in the administration (which may or may not be a war as we understood earlier conflicts). The fictionalized narrative which says that we are fighting a war against Al Qaeda is an attempt to lobotomize the people while deferring the unpleasantness of the manifest reality of the war. As long as the conflict is contained in this permanent state of suspension and ambiguity, the inevitability of total victory without cost remains the dominant and most pleasing narrative. No others need be entertained.
