Never mind democracy, where's the debate?

In this age of spin and the sound-bite, most of us are sufficiently cynically jaded to realize that much of what we read is honed and polished to be as palatable (or as provocative) as possible. But when the leaders of the free world get it wrong, or think enough of us aren't sufficiently gullible to swallow a gargantuan military effort and the murder of thousands of Iraqi civilians just so Donald Rumsfeld's Haliburton stock options will nudge up a couple of cents, Public Relations departments and press officers truly become a force to be reckoned with. Before the war, the White House even tried to compare George W. Bush with Winston Churchill, but in print this looked unbelievably crass, so - Puff! Media manipulation that was here and gone faster than a Jessica Lynch-manufactured rescue. But most people's memories fade just as quickly; if the name in the previous sentence means nothing to you, that's because it isn't meant to. A year ago, in the heat of battle, what Washington needed was some heartfelt pictures of the American soldier at the cutting edge of the action (or, in this case, lost in the Iraqi desert). The fact that it was, for the most part, a pack of lies, was incidental. It did the job of steeling resolve... Or should that be 'stealing'? This month, the buzzword in the world's English-language press is 'appeasement.' Although the word actually means to reduce somebody's feelings, it gained broad use in the 1930s to refer to the policy of containing Hitler. In almost every speech he makes these days, Bush uses this word to invoke disasters that will surely befall us all lest we even dare to question the wisdom of the neo-cons' tenet that they are righteousness personified, while the real disaster for Bush is in fact Spain's withdrawal from Iraq. This is, of course, no more than an extension of the 'you're either with us or against us' policy drawn up in the wake of 9/11, when the current administration realized that U.S. military supremacy was unchallengeable, but forgot that no empire in history has yet found a workable antidote to the irregular insurgent. However, with this level of spin, and in what is turning out to be a difficult re-election year for Bush, there are delicious ironies to be found. Last week, the Polish President made headlines around the world with his comment that Poland had been misled over WMDs. Although it was good of him to notice finally what the rest of us knew some time ago, Kwaśniewski's remarks came hard on the heels of Spain's decision to pull out, and sent shock waves through some of Washington's most exclusive restaurants. I nexplicably, the following day the story was effectively neutered; newspapers the world-over reporting that, after a friendly chat on the phone, Poland remained committed to supporting the USA in Iraq. To juxtapose the two issues of, on the one hand, Spain's democratic rejection of the neo-cons' warmongering and, on the other, Kwaśniewski's embarrassing volte-face, the question of course should be: Just who is appeasing whom?