In praise of comic relief in wartime

Even war has its comic relief, its absurdities that force one to laugh despite the gravity of the situation. In the days preceding the fall of Baghdad the job of providing that levity fell to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraq Minister of Disinformation, whose daily fulminations in behalf of the disintegrating Saddam Hussein regime earned him the nickname “Baghdad Bob.”

Until coalition forces abruptly canceled his act, the performance of the little bug-eyed propagandist in the black beret was a coveted highlight of the televised war coverage. Saddled with the rotten luck of having drawn the short straw as regime spokesman, Baghdad Bob gave it his best shot, providing better material for future productions of the late-night comedy shows than a stable of Hollywood writers at the top of their game could ever dream up.

Appearing to have lost touch with reality in his routine denial of events that viewers could see taking shape on their television screens, Sahaf, to the accompaniment of bombs bursting in the background, insisted that reports of coalition advances concocted by “ignorant imperialists, losers and fools” were simply “lies and illusions.”

The coalition forces, those “snakes slithering through the desert,” weren’t within a hundred miles of Baghdad, he assured viewers who had just watched the good guys seize control of the Baghdad airport. “The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad,” he boasted over the roar of coalition tanks rumbling down the city’s streets. “God is grilling their stomachs in hell…”

And so on, until viewers could imagine a giant hook emerging from the wings to haul the guy offstage and before a firing squad on the grounds that his over-acting had embarrassed even the sadistic Saddam regime. Spin has its limits, even to a despot on the run with a price on his head.

Putting the best face on things in wartime to boost the home team while demoralizing the enemy, or “spinning” in the modern vernacular, is nothing new. Piling it high in hope of gaining advantage is a tactic that has been employed by man since first the waging of war on his neighbor had seemed like a swell idea. It’s just that some combatants – most often the winners – do it better than others, as the Baghdad burlesque so aptly illustrated.

Spin’s wartime dance partner often is Obfuscation, a bureaucratic tool employed by those running the show to make things obscure, dark, vague, enigmatic, cryptic, ambiguous and equivocal just because they can. For my money, no one has mastered the technique quite like Donald Rumsfeld, the acerbic secretary of the Department of Defense, a man who, to put the best spin on it, does not lack for confidence in his ability to take charge.

Rumsfeld is at his best when performing for news reporters at Defense Department briefings. Some of his better stuff, gleaned from official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site and sent to me by dedicated e-mailer Bo Yerxa, is must reading for those who would excel in the art.

From a Feb. 12, 2002 briefing came this immortal beauty, perhaps borrowed in part from some earlier linguistic Machiavelli, perhaps not:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

A known known from a briefing this past Feb. 28:

“You’re going to be told a lot of things. You get told things every day that don’t happen. It doesn’t seem to bother people that they don’t happen. It’s printed in the press. The world thinks all these things happen. They never happened. Everyone’s so eager to get the story before, in fact, the story’s there, that the world is constantly being fed things that haven’t happened. All I can tell you is it hasn’t happened. It’s going to happen.”

From the same briefing, a word in behalf of clarity:

“I think what you’ll find is whatever it is we do substantively, there will be near-perfect clarity as to what it is. And it will be known to the Congress and it will be known to you – probably before we decide it. But it will be known.”

Great lines, all. Still, I favor this quasi-unknown unknown from October 2001: “Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterized as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won’t see. And life goes on.”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.