The CIA backs an unknown for president and secretly funds an ad campaign designed to scare the US out of its mind. Television slots show foreigners from rogue states with vastly inferior militaries developing nuclear arsenals designed to take the US by surprise. The CIA director reassures his allies that the US defence industry will go on to win, win, win. The candidate's ratings soar.
That was fiction: John Grisham's The Brethren. Grisham, a former Democratic representative in Arkansas, pulled the plug. Other fictions nourish amazingly similar scare tactics from George Dubya and his father's merry men this week, not least as argued on this page by Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of Defence.
Mr Wolfowitz is a man who spent many years waiting to stand still. He was under-secretary for defence in George Bush I's cabinet, back when current Vice-President Dick Cheney was defence secretary. The peace dividend of ending the Cold War wasn't paying off. Bush's popularity was plummeting: from an approval rating of 80 per cent in January, after invading Panama, down to 60 per cent and falling, on July 25th, 1990.
Today the 11th anniversary of the day after the day after George Bush I realised he needed help to win over the American people and maintain his sponsors, let us commemorate with a story from the late Bill Hicks, an adopted Arkansas man.
Hicks was a stand-up performer and commentator who challenged the Gulf War by quoting the movie Shane. Jack Palance forces a small farmer to pick up a gun. "Pickitup, pickitup!" The man won't. "Pickitup!" He still won't, he's scared and he's only in town to buy candy for the kids and a roll of gingham for his wife. Palance commands him: he picks it up. Kapow! Palance blasts him away. "You saw him," says Palance. "He had a gun."
How could poor, small countries collect the arsenals Bush - and Wolfowitz - claimed and how did the US know? All the US had to do was look at the receipt, Hicks said. As soon as the cheque cleared, they'd be goin' in to fight that little country in the name of God, democracy and whoever they currently liked. Hussein got the weapons that Wolfowitz says enabled him to make war because the Gulf War was for Aladdin, Hicks imagined. Bush (and Major) supporters would sell "machine tools" or "`farming equipment" to Iraq for rakes that transformed magically into armaments, as in "Wow, first it was a chicken coop, now it's a nuclear reactor."
Bush I played footsie with Saddam Hussein until the Gulf War. The pretext was "American interests" and the defence of Kuwait, meaning the US's life blood, oil. Kuwait had used the Iran-Iraq war to sell above OPEC guidelines, drilling from a territory it contested with its former national partner, Iraq.
At its height, the US controlled 500,000 military in the Gulf, more than it did in Europe during the worst of the Cold War. The Iraqi people were torched, bombed and deprived of basic facilities that still aren't back to the same level. Hundreds of thousands of children continue dying needlessly, because of economic sanctions. Then-general Colin Powell was asked to estimate how many Iraqis died during the war. "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in," he said.
Wolfowitz wrote passionately about the destruction of a US barracks in Dhahran, with 28 fatalities and 99 casualties. He didn't mention the Baghdad shelter where US bombs did so much damage that people watching a television video - not broadcast in the US - vomited when they saw bodies burned so badly the limbs were charred away.
Or the road to Basra, where retreating Iraqi people and Kuwaiti refugees were bombed into the sand. Bush refused to let Iraq retreat with any honour. Even the late Timothy McVeigh was shocked.
Joe Seidl, a US pilot, said bombing Basra was "almost like, um, hitting the jackpot. It is a very lucrative target. I mean, we can actually go out here and just kind of almost, I don't want to sound sarcastic or whatever, but we could really do some damage. Because I mean, there are thousands and thousands of vehicles out there and they're all heading north, and you know, they're probably all bad guys. Or they are all bad guys. And we can really put hurt on 'em."
Back at camp a lieutenant listening to the Basra debriefing called it "murder". Gen "Bull" Baker told him: "That wasn't murder, that was war, just to give him a little taste of reality." Basra reduces a Slobodan Milosevic to Aladdin's little helper.
But only small leaders are accountable to the war crimes tribunal. The US won't even support a ban on germ warfare, allegedly for security and industrial reasons. Are they afraid women in Africa will use the know-how to wash their whites whiter than the Moms at home?
"This is democracy. With 56 cable stations, all showing Gladiators, you are free to do as we tell you," Hicks signed off. "Go back to bed, America, your government is in control again."
mruane@irish-times.ie