These days, is seems as though everyone but a dedicated cadre of neoconservatives has lambasted President Bush and his stalwart attitude on Iraq in the editorial and Op-Ed pages of the nation’s major newspapers.
Moreover, European leaders have been up in arms over Bush’s John Wayne-ish posturing on the Iraqi issue, with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder emerging as one of the most vocal critics of Bush among U.S. allies — leading to a rare diplomatic spat with Washington.
How can Bush and posse lasso the slippery calve of public opinion, with so many bulls bucking in the coral?
On Sunday, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman advised President Bush that one should “never launch a war that you can’t explain to your people and the world on a bumper sticker.”
And therein lies the answer to Bush and his inner circle’s little problem: just come up with a catchy slogan, a juicy bone to throw to the American public, something for them to chew on for a while, yet easy to swallow.
What if Bush and Co. could convince the American public that the Iraqi opposition, after being abandoned by Bush 1, and suffering defeat after miserable defeat was really a force to be reckoned with, ready, willing and able to assist the U.S. in the overthrow of Saddam’s “evil” regime?
Tens of thousands of potential ‘freedom fighters’, another “Northern Alliance” or KLA, ready and anxiously awaiting much needed assistance: money, guns, Air America transport for their, errr…, lucrative ‘import-export’ businesses.
As an example, they could spotlight one brave faction, and give them a catchy name, something like, Democratic Iraqi Opposition of… Germany, let’s say.
The CIA could stage a daring, daylight raid on the Iraqi Embassy to Germany, making it possible for a small group from this faction to bribe its way into the tightly guarded facility.
Best of all, they’d be armed only with mace, and no one would get hurt.
To maintain the longstanding, imperial-presidential tradition of plausible deniability, Bush and Co. could instruct their loyal flaks to deny, deny, and deny again.
It would all be over before it even started, just long enough for the cameras to roll, and international embarrassment to set in, with only one month to go until elections in Germany.
And of course, to the delight of Bush and Co., Iraqi intelligence would confirm that the whole thing was simply a hoax, engineered by the CIA as a scolding for Schroeder’s ‘misbehavior’, and a subtle, if not brazen means of tilting a highly-contested re-election bid in favor of pro-invasion Christian Democrat Edmund Stoiber…come on, the American public would never fall for that.
Too bad Bush and friends didn’t think of this.
It would have made a great bumper sticker.
