Top Gun president: Commander Bush ignores the facts in his grab for military glory

National Catholic Reporter, May 16, 2003 by Raymond A. Schroth

On the morning of May 1 the tabloids, the New York Post and Daily News, set us up.

And the uncritical soft media, particularly TV, gobbled it up.

There were quick bios, pilot histories of the Bushes, father and son, without mentioning that Bush Sr., a real pilot in World War II, landing his plane on an aircraft carrier, once ended up in the sea, and that Bush W. had long-unexplained absences from the Texan Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

Then vivid graphics of the S-3B Viking that would carry Bush W. to a landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, plus spine-tingling warnings that this was a very dangerous maneuver.

The carrier Abraham Lincoln had been scheduled to arrive in San Diego a day earlier. But the commander in chiefs men told it to linger at sea, out of sight of land--put off the sailors' reunions with their families--so the commander could stage his media event: play his "Top Gun" role and descend from the clouds in full fighter pilot's battle regalia and tell the press, "Yes, I flew it."

Then slip into civilian duds, swagger-stride across the long deck (like that red-carpeted corridor in the White House), bask in the cheers of the crews assembled behind ropes in color-coded groups.

Then tell them a lot of things that were not true.

His stage managers were evoking images of FDR and Churchill meeting shipboard to announce the Four Freedoms during World War II and of Douglas MacArthur receiving the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri.

And much of the press lapped it up.

Historian and Churchill biographer John Luckas is ill at ease with the presidential military pose. It began, he says in The New York Times April 14, when President Reagan, who also had an imaginary military career, began returning military salutes. He writes: "There is something puerile in the Reagan (and now Bush) salute. It is the joyful gesture of someone who likes to play solider. It also represents an exaggeration of the president's military role." No presidents who governed us during great wars, he says--Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt--defined themselves as commanders in chief.

Meanwhile, once again this commander in chief tied Iraq in with the destruction of the World Trade Center and called this campaign a victory against terrorism.

He presumes that his audience has not read the newspapers. The justification for the war--remember the State of the Union message and Colin Powell's address to the United Nations and the "evidence," much of which was later shown to be bogus, of hidden weapons--seems to be melting like snow in June.

The news media, so slow to examine the administration's arguments when they might have prevented a war, now--with columnist William Raspberry and reporter Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins from Texas, John Farmer of the Newark Star-Ledger, The Village Voice and others--now dare suggest that the Bush people snookered us into a deadly expedition with no real proof that the administration's charges were justified.

Former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter suggested in a talk I saw on C-SPAN that Bush's lies could be violations of international law. More jaded pundits shake their heads and say that because the corporate-controlled TV networks will never give the story the oomph it needs to catch on, the American people will never really get the news that they were misled. The "Top Gun W" image will be so "embedded" as to cancel out the facts.

Bush told his audience, that this war's technology allowed them to pinpoint military targets and spare civilians. He did not tell them how many civilians had not been spared.

The body count Web site (Iraqbody count.net), which scrupulously records only documented deaths, as of April 26 notes between 2,197 and 2,670 dead--including 426 in Baghdad, 426 in Nagat, and 523 in Basra. But this doesn't touch the thousands of men, women, and children with arms, legs, and faces blown away.

Journalist Thomas Friedman, who wrote a fine book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, before he became a columnist for The New York Times, seems to have lost his moral moorings. First he justified this war on the abstract possibility that knocking out Saddam would create a domino effect of new Arab democracies. Now that the weapons of mass destruction argument is leaking and "democracy" in Iraq, if we allow majority rule, will mean Shiite control, he has found a retroactive reason: the dramatic front-page Times photo of the unearthed skull of a Saddam victim.

Anyone who feels that avenging the dead justifies killing and maiming the innocent living should look hard at the pictures, widely printed, of the young boy, Ali, whose arms we blew off. Please explain to Ali and his family that he has been liberated.

We should mourn the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as well. When I was there in 1992, I watched teenage boys swim in the pool of the Baghdad Hotel where I was staying and wondered how many of them would live through the inevitable second U.S.-Iraq war.

The administration does not want us to know--and refuses to talk about--Iraqi troop casualties. But one officer told the press his men had killed 2,000 to 3,000 in a one-day foray into Baghdad. Peter Maass' piece in The New York Times Magazine April 20 plus any number of accounts I have read and heard from witnesses depict our men often shooting recklessly at and killing civilians at checkpoints when a little more prudence would have spared innocent lives.