Retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks, former Central Command chief and Bush campaign surrogate for the past few months, was asked this week about how best to prepare the American people for the fact that the war in Iraq is nowhere near over. Franks may be new to politics, but his response showed that he’s learned the Republican playbook pretty well.
“Yeah, this thing in Iraq is not over. I think one of the things that all of us need to do, whether you’re in the old retired general business or whether you’re in the media business, is take an anti-expectation pill. You know? I remember a time long about the 9th, 10th, 11th of April of last year where there was a lot of media coverage of the fact that Saddam’s statue came down in Baghdad. We all remember that — when that happened. And then pretty soon there was created — and I would not take credit as the guy who created an expectation, I will just say that all of the reporting — and none of it was evil — but the reporting we all saw kind of created an expectation, ‘Well, probably peace is going to break out very, very quickly.'”
Classic Bush administration spin. The war in Iraq is a debacle for the ages, with catastrophic mistakes made every step along the way, but Franks has a scapegoat: the media created unreasonable expectations. How? By showing images of Saddam’s statue falling to the ground.
This is actually insane for two reasons. One, the administration wanted the media to broadcast those images. Two, it was military leaders like Franks that rigged the statue pull-down as a public relations stunt in the first place.
Regardless, to see someone like Franks shift responsibility to the media and the dreaded “high expectations” is pretty silly. As Al Kamen noted today:
Of course! The press did it. No one in the administration would have predicted a quick military campaign and elections or a cakewalk or anything like that.
No, of course not. Sure, it was Dick Cheney who insisted, “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” And it was Cheney who added that the war “will go relatively quickly.” And it was Donald Rumsfeld who said, “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” But it was the media who built unreasonable expectations, probably by reporting all these things the administration kept saying.