Tomgram

"Sometime next year, coming to a theater near you"

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Unscripted quotes of the day:

“In the effort to show that the United States was trying to take the initiative, the American administrator of Iraq, Jay Garner visited the Health Ministry today. The ministry building, unlike some others that have been burned by looters, is still usable, but most of the essentials of work have been stolen. There are no computers, virtually no files and the telephones, like elsewhere in the city, do not work.

“Maj. Gen. Carl Strock, of the Army Corps of Engineers, said at a news conference that civil servants were being asked to return to work. ‘We’re going to ask people to turn up to the buildings even if they don’t exist,’ he said, referring to the government ministries.

“Where there were no facilities left because of looting, workers would then be asked to ‘go elsewhere,’ he said.”

(From Jane Perlez and Michael R. Gordon, Baghdad Blasts At Arms Dump Kill at Least 6 in Sunday’s New York Times.)

Eric Umansky of Slate found the following little unexpected, unscripted exchange the other day and commented,

“Though the papers don’t mention it, there was a minor, confirmed,
uprising at the White House yesterday, specifically in the Press
Briefing room. One reporter, I.D.’d as ‘David,’ asked spokesman Ari
Fleischer whether the administration is still considering hitting
France with ‘consequences’ for its opposition to the war. Fleischer
evaded the question three times, then…

Q: Why won’t you answer the question about —

“Maj. Gen. Carl Strock, of the Army Corps of Engineers, said at a news conference that civil servants were being asked to return to work. ‘We’re going to ask people to turn up to the buildings even if they don’t exist,’ he said, referring to the government ministries.

“Where there were no facilities left because of looting, workers would then be asked to ‘go elsewhere,’ he said.”

(From Jane Perlez and Michael R. Gordon, Baghdad Blasts At Arms Dump Kill at Least 6 in Sunday’s New York Times.)

Eric Umansky of Slate found the following little unexpected, unscripted exchange the other day and commented,

“Though the papers don’t mention it, there was a minor, confirmed,
uprising at the White House yesterday, specifically in the Press
Briefing room. One reporter, I.D.’d as ‘David,’ asked spokesman Ari
Fleischer whether the administration is still considering hitting
France with ‘consequences’ for its opposition to the war. Fleischer
evaded the question three times, then…

Q: Why won’t you answer the question about —

MR. FLEISCHER: Greg.

Q: Hold on. We’re entitled to follow up, Ari–this isn’t homeroom.

MR. FLEISCHER: Greg. Greg.

Q: Why won’t you answer the question?

MR. FLEISCHER: Because David, there are other qualified reporters in
here, too, who can follow-up.

Q: I didn’t say they were not qualified, Ari. I’m saying you’re running
it like it’s homeroom, like we can’t follow-up when you’re refusing to
answer a question that’s been posed to you, directly.

MR. FLEISCHER: Greg.

Q [from Greg]: Do you want to elaborate on what those consequences
would be?

MR. FLEISCHER: I addressed it earlier.”
(Fleischer then abruptly changed the subject.)

We have to cherish these tiny, unscripted moments reported in the nooks and crannies of the media. There’s so much spinning and scripting going on right now in Washington by a regime hell-bent on holding onto power until the end of time and convinced that it knows how to work the world — and yet, for all the control, for all the planning and dreaming, for all the scripting of an American world at war, so much remains unscripted or under-scripted, and so much of the world is working, almost unnoticed, on entirely different scripts. Patrick Cockburn in the British Independent below reports on an “occupation” of Iraq that is proving to be desperately over-dreamed and under-scripted, overcooked and distinctly raw at one and the same time, and in almost immediate danger of being occupied and rewritten by those in the region with scripts of their own.

Linda Diebel in Sunday’s Toronto Star offers perhaps the best account I’ve seen of the players in the present Washington drama, their roles, the script they’re intent on following, and the ways in which they have attempted to reduce the American public to a “sitcom audience.” She confronts particularly the awareness among Washington’s top flight players from Rumsfeld to Rove that the Democrats, for all their pathetic disarray and their stunning nearly two years of silence and confusion, still have a strong shot at the White House in 2004 — and here’s the catch — “absent a war.” She all but guarantees that in the latest script now being written and rewritten in Washington another “war on terrorism” is all but inevitable — or as she puts it, “Sometime next year, coming to a theater near you” Tony Quinn, a California political analyst, takes up the same topic, historically, in the pages of the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section, also asking whether this administration can make it to 2004 warless. Tom

The Real Looting of Iraq May Just Be Beginning
In their present mood, there is no sign that either Bush or Blair appreciate the morass they have now entered
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
28 April 2003

At an American military checkpoint on the road north of Kirkuk, two US soldiers are holding up placards, each of which has a message written in Kurdish. One says: “Drivers must get into one lane”, the other: “Carrying weapons is forbidden”.

The problem is that the soldiers, being unable to read Kurdish, have mixed up the placards so one is angrily waving his sign — forbidding weapons — in front of a car which has tried to jump the queue, while a hundred yards down the road a harassed-looking officer is asking drivers in English, which they do not speak, if they are armed and he is only receiving benign smiles and thumbs-up signs in return.

It is easy enough to mock ordinary American soldiers being baffled in trying to establish their authority in one of the most complicated societies in the world.

The writer is co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of ‘Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession’

To read more Cockburn click here

On message, on script
Bush’s never-ending war story boasts a shocking and awesome cast of sometimes-crazed characters
By Linda Diebel

The Toronto Star
April 27, 2003

It seems so long ago, but it was only March 6 when George W. Bush ambled to a podium in the East Room of the White House and began to take questions from assembled reporters in a prime-time press conference.

His main message was the continuing threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and his sworn oath as president to protect the American people from that peril.

Bush had a “single question” for U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Remember him? Little Swedish guy? Seems to have disappeared?

“Has the Iraqi regime fully and unconditionally disarmed, or has it not?” asked Bush.

After all, the war was still almost two weeks away and there was, theoretically, still time for the Iraqi dictator to disarm.

“Saddam Hussein is not disarming,” said Bush.

“This is a fact. It cannot be denied.”

A fact.

To read more Diebel click here

After Victory, the Boot
By Tony Quinn
The Los Angeles Times
April 27, 2003

SACRAMENTO — Americans have a funny attitude toward their wartime leaders. Generally, it has been out the door once the war is over, even when victory was overwhelming. It’s a potential pitfall for President Bush.

The United States’ first triumph on the world stage was World War I. U.S. troops entered the war in the spring of 1917 and received much of the credit for the Allied victory in November 1918. President Woodrow Wilson traveled to Europe in early December for the Paris Peace Conference in January the most powerful and most beloved man in the world. Like Bush, he held strong moral views on how the world should be organized and on the role America should play in it, but fighting among the European powers quickly dashed his peace plans.

Tony Quinn is co-editor of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan analysis of the state’s congressional and legislative races

To read more Quinn click here