'GANDA MACHINE GEARS UP

We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can't control what will happen. Pinter was so dead-on when he said in his Nobel speech, "You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."

Right on cue the U.S. propaganda machine gears up for stage two. They have planted the gangrene in Iraq (Pinter again) and now are stepping aside with the claim that they can't control what happens. See this morning's news analysis, "A Path Forward, With Many Ifs," about the Bullshitter-in-Chief's strategy for "complete victory":

[I]n four recent speeches and an accompanying strategy document he has made his case, some of his aides concede, just as his ability to control events in Iraq may be about to erode.

American officials fully expect that for months after the Iraqi election on Thursday the American ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, will remain the critical behind-the-scenes power in the creation of a factious coalition to run the country.

Leaving that paradox unexplained (eroding control while pulling the strings) the "analysis" moves right along:

[I]t is the longer term -- the next year -- that worries many of Mr. Bush's advisers and the United States military. Amid insurgent attacks and warnings of civil war, the government may take months to form, and many officials wonder whether that lag will distract the Iraqis from leaping the hurdles that Mr. Bush wants them to clear before he will begin withdrawing American forces next year.

Besides,

One senior White House official, insisting on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about Iraq, said last week that in meetings "we've talked about the possibility that the new Iraqi government will see no advantage in putting its security forces out on the street quickly" if they think the result will be the departure of American firepower.

Although, of course:

Some officials have the opposite fear, that a new Iraqi government will ask the Americans to leave too quickly.

All agree, however, that over the next year the American ability to shape the Iraqi battleground will gradually decline.

Smooth stuff. Sometimes the gears of the 'ganda machine can sound like a cat's purr.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: By the way, we're not the only ones writing about the coming Sunni genocide. Have a look at Robert Parry's piece, "Bush in Iraq, Slouching toward Genocide," posted at Consortium News, his essential Web site. We hadn't seen the piece until this morning, but now that we have, we gotta say he was not just ahead of us, he laid out the argument better than us:

Despite pretty words about democracy and freedom, George W. Bush's "victory" plan in Iraq is starting to look increasingly like an invitation to genocide, the systematic destruction of the Sunni minority for resisting its US-induced transformation from the nation's ruling elite into second-class citizenship.

Parry noted, as we did, certain parallels between the infiltration of Iraqi government security forces by "death squads" operating against the Sunnis and the ones that operated in Central America in the 1980s under right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. And he speaks with the authority of an investigative journalist who broke many Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek:

The way Parry sees it,

The next element in the equation will be how far the war against the Sunnis goes -- or put differently, how stubbornly the Sunnis resist. For his part, Bush reiterated that he will only be satisfied with "complete victory," which suggests he is resolved to break the back of the Sunni resistance at whatever cost.

All we can say is, "Ditto."