JB

The New York Times reports that American inattention to widespread looting and criminality following the Iraqi war has led to chaos in the country, with many Iraqis now longing for the peace and order of their former Stalinist strongman, Saddam Hussein.

As you may recall, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at first downplayed the reports of widespread looting, remarking that "freedom's untidy:"

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

Among the many wonderful things that individual freedom-loving Iraqis have done in the month following war is carry off large parts of the country's infrastructure and electrical systems. Armed thugs now roam the streets, shooting and robbing people at will, terrorizing citizens and making them afraid to leave their homes. As a result, many stores and businesses have yet to reopen. Trade with other countries is essentially crippled because the safety of cargo cannot be guaranteed.

American troops have been slow to impose law and order on the country, exacerbating the problem and leading to growing anger and resentment among the Iraqi population:

Iraqi frustration at the power vacuum burst out this week, when Baghdad city workers pleaded with the American-run Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance to at least issue a public announcement that citizens must obey the law.

A senior official of the reconstruction office said a statement, to be read on a local American-financed radio station, was being prepared, although it was not clear what laws were now in effect in Iraq. For many Iraqis, the damage has been done.

"We used to have a brutal dictatorship that controlled everything," said Mahmoud Ahmed Uthman, chairman of Al Khair Financial Investments Company, an investment fund that has been active here for years. "When the government collapsed, there was nothing left except a great emptiness. And that emptiness has been filled with chaos."

It is still not too late to turn things around, but it is now clear that putting Iraq back in order is going to take much longer than the Bush Administration thought, or at least was willing to admit in public. Not surprisingly, the Administration announced yesterday that plans for returning rule to a provisional government by the end of this month have been shelved indefinitely. On May 5th, General Jay Garner announced confidently that "Next week, or by the second weekend in May, you'll see the beginning of a
nucleus of a temporary Iraqi government, a government with an Iraqi face on it that is totally dealing with the coalition."

Apparently he was a bit too optimistic.

The basic problem is that the Administration has either been deluded about the way that the reconstruction of Iraq would proceed-- which tends to undermine confidence in its judgments about risk assessment in general-- or else it has simply been unwilling to tell the truth to the American people for fear of losing support for its policies. Either possibility is deeply troubling.

Tom Friedman points out yet another defect of the Bush Administration's approach-- attention deficit disorder:

The buildup to this war was so exhausting, the coverage of the dash to Baghdad so telegenic, and the climax of the toppling of Saddam's statue so dramatic, that everyone who went through it seems to prefer that the story just end there. The U.S. networks changed the subject after the fall of Baghdad as fast as you can say "Laci Peterson," and President Bush did the same as fast as you can say "tax cuts."

They are not only underestimating how hard nation building will be with this brutalized people, but how much the looting and power vacuum have put us into an even deeper hole. We need an emergency airlift of military police officers, a mobile telephone system so people can communicate, and a TV station. And we need, as one U.S. general said to me, to "take that $600 million of Saddam's money we found behind that wall, go up in a helicopter and spread it from one end of the country to the other." We have to get the economy going.

Iraqis are an exhausted people. Most seem ready to give us a chance, and we do have a shot at making this a decent place — but not with nation building lite. That approach is coming unstuck in Afghanistan and it will never work in Iraq. We've wasted an important month. We must get our act together and our energy up. Why doesn't Mr. Rumsfeld brief reporters every day about rebuilding Iraq, the way he did about destroying Saddam?

Friedman's points are well taken, and they are symptomatic of a larger problem: The Administration's boredom with the reconstruction of Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. The Bush Administration seems to be all about smoke and mirrors, all about creating messes that other people will have to clean up somewhere down the road. It is true in Iraq, it is true in Afghanistan, it is true with respect to homeland security, and it is true of that fiscal obscenity called the Bush tax cut. It is no accident, I think, that this Administration has so perfectly refined the art of image manipulation. Image is everything. It has to be everything, for the manipulation of images is the surest path to diverting attention from the mounting problems that the Adminstration's polices are creating.

The Bush years have proven to be one giant Potemkin Village designed to fool the American public into thinking it has a strong, decisive leader who cares about us and is making us safe, strong, and secure. Yet it is quite clear, when one looks beyond the fantasy world projected on Fox News, that none of this is happening. We are not safer: Afghanistan and Iraq are both in a shambles, Al Qaeda is reasserting its muscle, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are unaccounted for, and above all the weapons of mass destruction for which we went to war and risked American lives have not been found. (Perhaps they were seized by looters in the confusion of the war, perhaps they had been destroyed long before the saber rattling began, or perhaps they were just a phantasm, the product of bad CIA intelligence.) And while the President has been making us less safe abroad, he has done little to protect the economy at home, instead pushing with monomaniacal devotion for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a policy which will do nothing to stimluate the economy and everything to pad the wallets of his wealthiest contributors.

Do I sound cynical about this Administration? If so, it is because the real cynics are in the White House, working as hard as they can to pull the wool over our collective eyes. (I would have said that we are only getting what we deserve, since we elected this fellow, but in fact... well don't get me started.).

Our last President lied compulsively about what he did with his penis. Our current President lies compulsively about what he is doing to our economy and our national security. You be the judge of which has the greater potential for harm in the long run.

The Bush Administration has taken Lincoln's famous adage and turned it upside down. It is not necessary to fool all of the people all of the time, as long as one can fool enough of the people enough of the time, or at least until the next Presidential election. It takes a Potemkin Village to keep a Bush in power.