Best-Selling Global Fictions

Iraq is a sovereign country that makes its own decisions. Zimbabwe's dictator will be brought into line -- by someone else. Protests over Tibet mar the noble ideals of the Olympics. And only a few poorly chosen words by Barack Obama about bitterness in Pennsylvania give the misleading impression that he and his supporters are elitist.

Politicians exist to recast reality on their own terms. Political fictions -- such as these four examples -- serve to focus attention on peripheral events and obscure the uncomfortable central truths that national leaders will not, or cannot, overcome. They tempt us to rush past the obvious, to confuse the ephemeral with the essential:

· Iraq is Exhibit A of a useful political fiction being the bone that the burglar throws to distract the watchdog, as T.S. Eliot wrote of a poem's ostensible meaning.

President Bush and his aides emphasize that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deserves both credit and blame for acting on his own and precipitously sending a division-size force of Iraqi soldiers and police to Basra last month to attack Shiite militiamen. Maliki miscalculated, but he showed himself to be decisive and independent, goes the official version.

But the weight of the unacknowledged continuing American occupation broke through as soon as Maliki's offensive faltered. The prime minister's own chief of security, Salim Qassim, was shot dead by a sniper as he stepped out of Basra Palace to use his cellphone on March 28. Maliki, nearby, was in physical danger as the fighting raged, according to intelligence reports.

The CIA flashed word to Washington that the offensive -- and Maliki's government -- was about to collapse. That was when U.S. units were ordered into action to save Iraq's sovereign but defenseless prime minister, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.

The harsh truth is that the Bush administration grievously erred in saddling Iraq with a heavy-handed U.S. occupation rather than staging the 2003 invasion as a humanitarian intervention and liberation. U.S. efforts to include complete freedom to conduct operations in Iraq under a status-of-forces agreement being negotiated with Maliki would further demonstrate the hollowness of Iraqi sovereignty.

· In the deepening tragedy of Zimbabwe, the accepted fiction is that someone or something else will rescue the suffering people of that southern African nation from the unquenchable power lust of President Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe's blatant disregard of election results that would have turned him out of office has set the global watchdog barking. But Zimbabwe's neighbors, along with the African Union and the world's major powers, are rummaging through their bottomless bag of bones in search of fresh justifications for not acting as Mugabe destroys the country.

American and British leaders maintain relative quiet on Mugabe's atrocities, fearing that they would be easy targets for anti-white tirades by the former African nationalist. It is up to Zimbabwe's neighbors to act, they primly suggest.