Where peace is not a pie ...Rick's Cafe Americain

First stop, Fox News.  Here’s the good word for today: Fallujah Talks On Hold; Car Bomb Kills Six.  Kind of a downer, but then I saw that Zarqawi has pledged allegiance to bin Laden.  Wonderful!!  How refreshing to get a fair and balanced view of Iraq!  Also, Fox brought me news of our vaunted coalition and the tremendous international support that George W. Bush has gathered in Iraq!  Yes, you can read all about it in “UK: Troops Not Going to Baghdad".  Oddly, no mention was made of Poland.

Still, maybe today was just a bad day in Iraq.  I searched the archive, but it was just more of the same.  The cops we’re training are getting killed, our own guys are getting killed, and members of the military and their families say the Bush administration underestimated the number of troops needed in Iraq.  Wow, I guess the Liberal Media Borg have finally assimilated Rupert Murdoch!

Undaunted, I went to the one place I knew I could count on to give me the unvarnished truth about Iraq: the White House.

OK, are you done laughing?  Because really, it shouldn’t be funny.

Anyway, it turns out the White House has a whole section of their website devoted to Iraq.  Seeing as how this is the perfect place to disseminate all the good news about Iraq the President claims isn’t being reported by the mainstream media, I was sure I’d hit a goldmine.  I went directly to the “News” section, and was surprised to see nothing more than a list of public statements made by the President (and every once in a while his staff) about Iraq.  Is this meant to indicate that the only “news” of note on Iraq has been that the President talks about it, or are we to believe that all the relevant “news” about Iraq is contained in the President’s statements?  I ask because most of what he says is pretty nonspecific, and a lot of it is just him complaining about the media focusing on the bad stuff.

So where is the good stuff?  Well, I had hardly exhausted the White House’s Iraq page, so I kept looking, clicking on a link to something called the “Iraq Liberation Update", and eagerly clicked on it.  Surely this would be a detailed account of the progress we have made in Iraq, and proof of our unwavering commitment to the Iraqi people and the cause of Iraqi freedom.  What I found was a whole list of quotes, many of which contained positive sentiments, if not exactly good news, and some of which actually contained good news—or at least references to good news.  I was somewhat encouraged, until I realized that the entries stop in December of 2003.  Has there been no good news in the past ten months, or did the White House just stop caring?

Then I clicked on a link called “100 Days of Progress in Iraq", but this turned out to be a series of Top Ten lists from August of 2003.  Maybe the President was going to be guest-hosting for Letterman?  A bit exasperated, I clicked on the Iraqi Fact of The Day.  Apparently the last day the Iraqis had facts was June 29, 2004.  Which is when I realized what the problem was—I was still thinking in terms of “facts”, and “reality”!!!  How anachronistic!

As the White House website clearly shows, the true liberation of the Iraqi people came on or about June 30, 2004—the first day on which they were able to exist entirely free from the oppressive burden of facts!  As the last four years have shown us, what many of us liberals still think of as “Democracy” is merely the larval stage of true freedom: liberation from the shackles of “fact” and the burdens of “reality”—the transendence of Empire.  As one of George W. Bush’s senior advisors put it:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Frère Jacques, dormez vous?