Going well

I have friends and relatives who fervently believe that the war in Iraq is going well. Any bad news you may be hearing is simply the distortions, lies and propaganda of the evil liberal media.

(Since I'm part of that evil, liberal media, you can imagine what my Christmas visit with my family was like.)

I say that they believe this "fervently" — an adverb settled on because "honestly" and "earnestly" just won't fit.

This is not something one can believe honestly. It's too wild, too expansive a claim. It encompasses too many incompatible things.

Believing such a thing requires a delicate touch, an epistemological finesse. In order to avoid engaging the reality that this construct exists to deny, you need to be able to recognize that reality from a distance so that you can give it a wide berth, all while insisting that there's nothing over there to see.

All of which calls for a certain mental nimbleness. It's an exercise which may be done fervently but requires too much deliberate self-deception to be done honestly.

I find such nimbleness impressive in a way. It calls for a remarkable capacity for sudden, seismic shifts in perception. If James Baker and the former presidents he served side with the version of reality reported by the lying media, then Baker, Ford and Bush 41 must be regarded as newly untrustworthy, exposed as members of the vast conspiracy of deception. James Baker, left-winger. It can't be easy telling yourself something like that without giggling — or passing out — from the cognitive dissonance.

This flexible approach to reality requires that the trustworthiness of any witness must be evaluated according to what they say, not according to how they know or the evidence they present. Thus eyewitness reporters in Iraq, like CNN's Nic Roberts, are deemed not credible because they're seeing the things you don't believe are there to be seen. They're obviously part of a conspiracy of dishonesty –why else would they have gone to the trouble of faking so many videos?

The same goes for other eyewitnesses — including the troops themselves, whose firsthand accounts can be categorized as either partyline trustworthy or disgruntled/dishonest. The large number of active troops and recent veterans who seem to be part of the grand conspiracy of deception is another one of those frightening facts that have to be half-glimpsed and semi-consciously avoided from a distance.

Easier to avoid, because they're already at a distance, are the voices of Iraqis themselves. So when River sums up the situation in her country thusly:

A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted. …

That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible — from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.

She can either be dismissed as a fraud and liar or ignored completely. That can be done fervently, but it cannot be done honestly.

Anyway, I've got to go to work now to make sure we're hiding all the good news and properly promoting our lying, deceptive, politicized, negative account.