Terrorism: Bush's Favorite Boogey-man

by Jim Babka
May 28, 2004

Pretend for a moment that you're George W. Bush. For the last two weeks the news has been filled with talk about how your central policy – a war against a nation that never attacked the United States, never even threatened to, and almost certainly couldn't have after a decade of sanctions and embargoes – is failing. The media is reporting, with seeming delight, how…

• Your promise for a transitional government by June 30 rings hollow,
• Leaders of the provisional government are being assassinated,
• Hundreds of servicemen and women are dying, and
• Pictures of sexual abuse of Prisoners of War by your Department of Defense – gross violations of the Geneva Convention – are splashed all over newspapers and television.

And worst of all, your job approval rating is plummeting. It's dropping, just like your father's approval rating did when he was running for re- election. It's falling in the same manner that Jimmy Carter's rating did when he was running for re- election.

Your handlers all realize what the Pew Charitable Trust, Gallup, Zogby, and the Democratic Leadership Council has already announced in various forums; that the job approval rating of a sitting president in May of the election year is the best predictor of that president's election night percentage.

And your numbers just dropped to 47%. Even worse, your disapproval number just reached 51%.

What do you do? How do you stop the free-fall? How do you change what the media is talking about? How do you move those pictures off the front page and the discussion of prisoner-abuse off of talk radio?

You call a press conference. You announce a crisis. And if you're George W. Bush you reach for your proven favorite – terrorism.

You and your crew may have screwed up in Iraq, but Americans still see you as strong against terrorism. It's time to call a press conference to remind them of that.

And Wednesday, that's exactly what the Bush Administration did. Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke to the media and changed the news cycle. The plan appears to have worked. Since then, no one's talking about your long list of failures. No one mentioned your P.O.W. scandal this morning.

The level of terrorist activity and the need for a press conference may be real. But given how this administration has lied about terrorist threats in the past, I'm a wee-bit skeptical – about the timing that is.

(Note: No sooner had I written this column then evidence arrived to bolster my skepticism: According to Friday morning's National Journal, "Homeland Security officials 'say they had little advance notice before Attorney General John Ashcroft' on Wednesday 'issued his broad warning' of a possible terrorist attack, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Homeland Security officials believed the information being used by Justice, much of which had been known for some time, was not new or specific enough to merit an announcement or other action.'")

The explosion of a Spanish train right before their national elections was an indication we should expect something similar here. And the photos coming out of Abu Ghraib are recruitment postcards for Al Qaeda, increasing the odds we'll be attacked this Summer. That's not news.

So was Ashcroft standing up for our safety yesterday or did Karl Rove decide it was time to change the story to save Bush's political ratings? I don't know. The information yesterday may all have been true.

But even that says something about this administration. The admission that we should be on the lookout for such an attack means we might not even be winning the War on Terrorism – that all this effort has amounted to little. And the Bush-led foray into Iraq may have even increased the odds we'll face another September 11^th.

There's only one long-term solution to the disastrous foreign policy of the United States – a policy so hideous it creates enemies all over the globe. Keep telling the story of Iraq so that no American president will ever want to do such an illegal and stupid thing again.

So while the President tries to change the front-page story, we'll stick to the facts.

Here's a FACT: 65 American servicemen have died in Iraq during the month of May, including one Army soldier and three Marines the same day Ashcroft was holding his press conference. Of course, news of the four was lost in the hubbub of Ashcroft's headline-stealing press conference.

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