Wag the Dog - Crisis Scenarios for Deflecting Attention from the President's Woes

In the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, White House spinmeister Conrad Brean seeks to deflect public attention from a brewing scandal over an alleged sexual encounter in the White House between the president and an all-too-young Girl Scout-type by concocting an international crisis. Advised by a Hollywood producer (played with delicious perversity by Dustin Hoffman), Brean "leaks" a fraudulent report that Albania has acquired a suitcase-sized nuclear device and is seeking to smuggle it into the United States. This obviously justifies an attention-diverting military reprisal. The press falls for the false report (sound familiar?) and all discussion of the president's sex scandal disappears from view -- or, as Brean would have it, the "tail" of manufactured crisis wags the "dog" of national politics.

As Brean explains all this to the White House staff in the film, American presidents have often sought to distract attention from their political woes at home by heating up a war or crisis somewhere else. Now that the current occupant of the White House is facing roiling political scandals of his own, it stands to reason that he, too, or his embattled adviser Karl Rove (not to speak of his besieged Vice President, Dick Cheney) may be thinking along such lines. Could Rove -- today's real-life version of Conrad Brean -- already be cooking up a "wag the dog" scenario? Only those with access to the innermost sanctum of George Bush's White House can know for sure, but it is hardly an improbable thought, given that they have done so in the past.

It bears repeating that this administration -- more than any other in recent times -- has employed deception and innuendo to mold public opinion and advance its political agenda. Indeed, the very scandal now enveloping the White House -- the apparent conspiracy to punish whistle-blower Joseph Wilson by revealing the covert CIA identity of his wife, Valerie Plame -- is rooted in the President's drive to mobilize support for the invasion of Iraq by willfully distorting Iraqi weapons capabilities. Why then would he and his handlers shrink from exaggerating or distorting new intelligence about other hostile powers, and then using such distortions to ignite an international crisis?

Add to this the fact that a rising level of belligerence is already detectable in the statements of top administration officials regarding potential adversaries in the Middle East and Asia. Most striking perhaps was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's truculent appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 19. Under questioning from both Democratic and Republican Senators, she refused to rule out the use of military force against Syria or Iraq, nor would she acknowledge any presidential obligation to consult Congress before engaging in such an action. Asked by Senator Paul Sarbanes (Dem.-Md.) whether the administration actually "entertains the possibility of using military action against Syria or against Iran" and "could undertake to do that without obtaining from Congress an authorization for such action," she replied: "What I said is that the President doesn't take any of his options off the table and that I will not say anything that constrains his authority as Commander in Chief." While insisting that the administration was still relying on diplomacy to resolve its differences with Syria and Iran, she left no doubt as to Bush's preparedness (and right) to employ force at any time or place of his choosing.