Five years on, we're now being told that the Mission Accomplished airshow stunt didn't mean that the Iraq mission was over. All they were trying to say is that the Carrier Abraham Lincoln was celebrating it's "Mission Accomplished".
Right.
After completing the longest tour of duty for any Carrier in the Navy (10 months vs the standard 6 month deployment), I'm sure the sailors of the Abraham Lincoln didn't mind cruising in circles for another two days to facilitate this celebration.
So in honor of the present re-writing of History by the White House on the events of five years ago, let's take a trip down memory lane. A wonderful article published in the Harvard Review last year reviewing Frank Rich's book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" really nails the absurdity of the whole exercise. A favorite passage from the article:
There was costume: Bush emerged from the cockpit "draped in more combat gear than a Tom Cruise stunt double," and the crew members in the official audience wore color-coordinated garb. There were set design and choice of props: a White House advance team supervised renaming the plane Bush flew—normally used for refueling—as Navy One, and painting George W. Bush, Commander in Chief on its fuselage. The Mission Accomplished banner "was positioned high up so that it appeared as a halo hovering above the president," Rich writes.
Of course there was a written script, and cinematography, too. The president’s address began "precisely at dusk in the West—Hollywood’s so-called magic hour, much prized by cinematographers for the golden glow it bestows on any scene." And while the uninitiated might have thought the Abraham Lincoln was far out to sea, those directing the show had simply positioned the carrier to evoke that appearance: "...if the camera angle had been different," writes Rich, "it would have revealed the San Diego skyline, fewer than 40 miles away."
Characteristically, Rich also mentions certain rather inconvenient facts that fell outside the camera angles. For one, Bush, was not officially announcing the end of the war, because, under the Geneva Conventions, doing so would require the release of more than 6,000 POWs. Second, Rich follows a line from Bush’s speech, "With those [9/11] attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got," with his own observation that "...this war happened to be against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11," a fact "largely overlooked in the excitement" of the victory celebration.
Another small thing: the "eagerly homeward-bound troops" aboard the Abraham Lincoln had their return to San Diego "stalled by a day to accommodate the pageantry of Bush’s tailhook landing"—a minor delay, perhaps, for troops whose "deployment at sea had already been extended from six months to ten, the longest by a carrier in thirty years, to help fill the maw of an understaffed war." The networks’ editing rooms also omitted any untidy details of the president’s own military record, like his erratic attendance while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, where whatever flying he did was thousands of miles distant from military combat. And in the final analysis, Rich says in an interview, "The Top Gun image of victory trumped the reality that the insurgency was underway."
Recommended reading for all Kossacks.