In verbal chess, who’s appeaser?

POLITICAL rhetoric is a never-ending chess match that gathers intensity as an election approaches.

The successful players know that the best way to win is to dominate your opponent by forcing him or her to contest the game on your terms and that the way to do that is to think as many moves ahead as you can.

Whatever else it can or cannot do, the Bush administration plays major league electoral chess. So, it’s the proximity of November’s midterms that made this week’s speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld -- and the coverage they received -- matters of more than passing interest. Essentially, all three attempted to draw a parallel between the debates over how best to resolve the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and the pre-World War II controversies over whether or how to confront rising fascism.

In this instance, the terrorist adherents of Islamic fundamentalists become Islamofascists and those who oppose a continuation of the Bush administration’s military policies in Iraq become ... well, more on that shortly.

In his address to the American Legion, the president was careful to say that “many” of those who oppose his conduct of the Iraqi war are “sincere” and “patriotic” but “could not be more wrong.” It was a shrewd bit of calculation, since not even Karl Rove could convince anyone that George W. Bush can tell the difference between a fascist and a frankfurter.

When he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Cheney was slightly less restrained, calling “a vigorous debate on the issues ... part of the greatness of America” but going on to argue that “there is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism.”

That set the board for Rumsfeld, the administration’s designated tough guy, who told the American Legion that the years leading up to World War II were “a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, and rise of fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed and ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem.... I recount the history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.”

The Defense secretary went on to synopsize what he alleged were media distortions concerning the war in Iraq and its abuse of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and urged the American Legionnaires to adopt a watchdog role. That, he said, “is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global scale, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge, so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegation we see.... That is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.”

In an op-ed piece published by The Times on Friday, Rumsfeld was given the opportunity to make many of the same points in almost precisely the same language employed in his speech. “Today, some think that World War II and the Cold War were black-and-white affairs: good versus evil. But there were always those who thought that we should retreat within our borders.

“In an effort to avoid repeating the carnage of World War I, much of the Western world tried to appease the growing threats in Europe and Asia in the years before World War II.”

There’s the word this whole rather clumsy bit of rhetorical choreography really is all about: “appeasement.”

Electoral chess game

This sequence of speeches with their carefully chosen audiences has nothing to do with fascism -- Islamo or otherwise -- and everything to do with introducing the word “appeasement” into our domestic debate over the war in Iraq.

So far, of course, no elected lawmaker or official has proposed negotiating with Osama bin Laden or any other Islamofascist terrorists, as the historical appeasers did with Adolf Hitler. Rather, the entire debate so far has been about whether the war in Iraq has advanced the struggle against Islamic radicals. That’s the ground the administration is hoping to change with this sequence of moves in the electoral chess game.

If opponents of Bush’s military policies in Iraq can be made “appeasers,” it gives the administration’s partisans a way to attack them without questioning their patriotism -- something against which polls show Americans instinctively recoil. The real “appeasers,” after all, weren’t unpatriotic -- think Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax -- they were dreadfully, almost fatally mistaken.

Think folly so complete that it carries the whiff of treason.

What’s doubly interesting about all this is that we have a recent -- indeed, ongoing -- example of what happens when the administration is allowed to dictate the rhetorical terms of debate. In the forthcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, former Slate columnist Eric Umansky compellingly documents the American news media’s generally lackluster performance in reporting the Bush administration’s adoption of torture as state policy. It is failure rooted in the acceptance of the government’s euphemisms for its conduct -- “coercive interrogation,” “extraordinary rendition” and the like.

As Umansky writes: “Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [a handful] of reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.” However, “when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.”

Umansky notes that the media’s tentative and frequently timid approach to covering the Bush administration’s adoption of torture as state policy began with senior editors’ reluctance to accept the evidence of their own reporting and was abetted by “long-standing journalistic shortcomings; for example, the tendency to treat both sides of an issue equally, without regard to where the facts lie.”

It is a disregard that continued this week in the generally matter-of-fact, news-story-as-usual treatment most of the media gave the portion of Rumsfeld’s address in which he attacked alleged distortions by the press and Amnesty International of the events at Abu Ghraib and of conditions at Guantanamo. (According to Rumsfeld in The Times on Friday, the biggest problem confronted by prisoners in America’s Cuban gaol is whether to interrupt their reading of “Harry Potter” for soccer, basketball or another serving of halal meat.)

None of the accounts of the Defense secretary’s speech bothered to point out something from the public record that Umansky includes in his piece: The general “who had overseen the report on FBI allegations of abuse at Guantanamo later testified that Rumsfeld had been ‘personally involved’ and was given ‘weekly updates’ on the interrogation of one detainee, who was kept near freezing and led around naked on a leash. Interrogation logs later showed that the detainee’s heart rate became so slow during his ‘cold’ treatment that he nearly dies. Another prisoner in CIA custody in Afghanistan died of hypothermia.”

The confusion between callous indifference and evenhandedness is a form of moral blindness that begins in the fog of euphemism. You cannot recognize things for what they are when you’ve forfeited the ability to call them by their real names. As Umansky’s report clearly documents, much of the American press was so cowed by the Bush administration and so crippled by its unexamined inhibitions that it badly failed in its obligation to report this government’s embrace of torture.

That failure began when the news media uncritically adopted the government’s vague new labels for what it was doing to its prisoners. If the administration now is allowed to recast the critical debate over the war in Iraq into a spitting match between farsighted anti-fascists and cringing appeasers, it will be worse than tragic.