Who can lay claim to a name with three vowels in succession? Well, John DiIulio has a total of five out of seven. Remember him? He was the first head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which later hired David Kuo. He gave Ron Suskind a lot of interesting background on the political machinations in the Cheney/Rove White House. He invented the term Mayberry Machiavellis, and complained about the politicization of policy.

DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove and his people, “who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”

I might have preferred something stronger than “unfettered”, but the point is valid.

After the interview with Suskind, DiIulio wrote him a letter that was published in Esquire. In the letter he says this about Rove:

Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove. Some in the press view Karl as some sort of prince of darkness; actually, he is basically a nice and good-humored man. And some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl’s real or perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the president’s top people routinely tell the president what they really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office. … Little happens on any issue without Karl’s okay, and, often, he supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out. Fortunately, he is not just a largely self-taught, hyper-political guy, but also a very well informed guy when it comes to certain domestic issues. (Whether, as some now assert, he even has such sway in national security, homeland security, and foreign affairs, I cannot say.)

It appears that we can now say. Gareth Porter of IPS has a fascinating story about the Iranian proposal for negotiations in 2003. As it appears to have been a serious offer from a potential negotiating partner who remains skeptical but is willing to talk, it was dealt with in the classical manner: it was ignored. Think what it would do to the economy.

Of course, the Iranians, who were playing chess at universities when the Europeans were living in mud huts and their kings couldn’t read, are capable of strategic bluffing.

Americans, on the other hand, especially politicians and particularly (though not exclusively) right-wing politicians, tend to think in terms of football and poker: either you knock the other guy over or you con him. The important facts are hidden: your physical capabilities and whatever information you’ve managed to conceal about your plans.

In this situation, bluffing is purely tactical: you’re hoping the opponent will fall for the fake. If it fails, you’ll try something else, generally a lesser plan. Strategic bluffing is more like a feint: it attempts to draw the opponent off balance. It does not depend on the opponent’s mistake for success. Simply requiring a response from the opponent proves where the initiative lies, and the side with the initiative is well known in chess to have an edge. Psychologically, it’s much easier to attack than to defend; it’s more fun, and less stressful, to dictate events than to respond to requirements, at least for most people. I suppose Tigran Petrosian is a counterexample.

The point is that if we’re playing poker while they play chess, we’re in deep-dish sheep-dip cherry-stone pie.

Porter reports that Rove received (from Bob Ney, now in prison but at the time the only Farsi-speaking member of Congress) a copy of the Iranian proposal “within days” of its arrival at the State Department, then headed by Colin Powell. Condoleezza Rice denied in Congressional testimony last week that she had seen the offer from Iran in 2003. But if a copy went to State, and another copy was delivered to Rove (and acknowledged two hours later in a phone call), it becomes difficult to believe Condi. Again.

If you happen to be one of those innocents who can’t believe we’d ignore a legitimate peace proposal so we could proceed with a pre-planned war, you wouldn’t want to read The Persian Gulf TV War by Douglas Kellner, professor of philosophy of education at UCLA.

On August 12 [1990], Iraq agreed to withdraw from Kuwait if Syria and Israel withdrew from occupied Arab lands in Lebanon and the occupied territories; although this move was clearly an opening to begin a negotiated settlement, the United States derisively dismissed the initiative. As Noam Chomsky (1990) explained: “Television news that day was featuring a well-staged presentation of George Bush the dynamo, racing his power boat, jogging furiously, playing tennis and golf, and otherwise expending his formidable energies on important pursuits, far too busy ‘recreating’ (as he put it) to waste much time on the occasional fly in Arab garb that he might have to swat. As the TV news clips were careful to stress, the President’s disdain for this irritant was so great that he scarcely even broke his golf stroke to express his contempt for what the anchorperson termed Hussein’s ‘so-called offer,’ not to be regarded as ‘serious.’ The proposal merited one dismissive sentence in a news story on the blockade in the next day’s New York Times”…

Déjà vu all over again.