Everyone will be talking about the Washington Post article whose byline comprises six writers (Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick, and Robin Wright) and a researcher (Julie Tate).
The story of executive branch discussions provides plenty to chew on, from vicious infighting to blithe disregard for reality to political calculations that involve lives.
Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.
With that level of effort they had a chance to produce a decent policy, had they taken it in mind to do so. But their policy is faith-based. The Decider has decided, and experience tells us what that means:
“The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”
I expect some people will take issue with this article on the basis that a lot of it is bullshit. My view is that the bullshit parts are probably accurate representations of the administration’s thinking. Whether they’re equally representative of the thinking of the article’s authors is a different question. DeYoung has written some of the best stuff about the political decision-making process on Iraq; Tyson, Warrick, and Baker have done good work as well. Ricks was famously for the war at the beginning but has contributed critical thinking once he realized it would fail, regardless of motive. Robin Wright has been in the moderate-Republican to hawkish-Democrat neighborhood since at least the Iran hostage crisis; a viewpoint far to the right of mine, but I still read her because her sources are good, and I don’t think she lies. I disagree with her bias, but I know what it is and interpret information in that light.
This article is not, in other words, written by Post equivalents of Judy Miller, but by people who can be read in a way that is informative if you read between the lines just a little.
To get access to this level of inside thinking in a famously secretive administration, reporters would essentially be required to agree to present the thinking as given to them, without much commentary. I don’t think these folks have pulled a Broder or a Woodward, I think they’ve agreed to restrictions because knowing how insiders were thinking serves several ends.
The most basic purpose served is that of informing the public about the real goings-on in the republic. In this case, how completely the White House has lost its grip on reality, if more data were needed in that area.
The article also contributes data to the historical record. I have no objection to, in fact I strongly support, adding the self-proclamation to the record. It’s often useful in assessing a situation to know what people were thinking as they made their decisions, particularly when the results were disastrous. Recording those thoughts doesn’t mean we’re granting their sanity or morality. It means that in order to get a realistic Big Picture we need to consider what the various actors were doing, and why.
In fact, as William Faulkner’s novels demonstrate at length, your enemies and opponents, whom you may regard as acting from evil motive, almost never see themselves that way. Sometimes they see you that way. But it’s extremely rare that people actually decide to do what they think is evil. Much more often, they choose what seems best from what they view as a limited set of choices.
Cognitive psychology suggests that we filter the data our senses get from the world because there’s too much of it to process. The shape of the filter is based on our ideas about the world, and that shape determines what we call information as opposed to noise. The logical conclusion is that a belief fundamental enough to affect the filter will tend to be confirmed by sensory data; what doesn’t confirm it will tend to seem irrelevant or anomalous.
If we believe in miracles or alien visitations or demons, we’re more likely to encounter them. If our experience is that difficult problems can be solved by breaking them into smaller pieces, we’ll at least try that before we give up. If we believe that absolute unchanging truth should be the basis of life, we tend to be attracted to authoritative personalities, whom non-believers call authoritarian. If we believe in a Hobbesian world, a sort of modern jungle, we’ll avoid coöperation even when it’s in our interest, just to prove the point. If we believe government is a bad thing, we’ll govern badly. If we believe we’re attractive, we’ll interpret friendliness as a come-on; if not, we won’t recognize overt signals.
It may be an overstatement to say that we create our own reality, but we do create our own list of choices based on our understanding of the situation. At a simple level, generals or chessplayers who invent a strategy that takes the opponent by surprise are celebrated because they realize that received wisdom about the available choices is incomplete; in the popular phrase, they think outside the box. They have a limited set of variables to consider, but the number of combinations, though finite, is really, really huge. In such situations, practice generates intuition. Playing lots of five-minute chess may have bad influences or not, but it certainly provides a breadth of experience that helps one locate areas of comfort and preference, and thus to navigate in that direction. War games serve, or at least should serve, a similar purpose.
But I digress. What I want to say about the Post article is that if you’ve been reading, say, Karen DeYoung’s articles, frequently linked to in the blogosphere, you know she’s been showing a bit more skepticism than we saw from the press corps for the first few years of Bush II. So I look for subtle indications of whether she’s buying the administration line, or just recording it for informational and historical purposes.
Amid the uncertainty, the overriding imperative for Bush these past eight months has been to buy time — time for the surge to work, time for the Iraqis to get their act together, time to produce progress. In Washington’s efforts to come to grips with the war it unleashed, the story of these months is one of trying to control the uncontrollable.
They don’t bring up the deaths likely to occur as Bush buys time, overtly; the subject lurks ominously just out of sight.
They pass up the chance to make fun of Bush’s trip to Camp Cupcake, not mentioning its size, remoteness, or hardening, but consistently attending to the effect of the visit on insider thinking.
The trip energized Bush and his team. Even Gates said he was more optimistic than he has been since taking office. While the secretary had been “cagey” in the past, a senior defense official said, “he’s come to the conclusion that what Petraeus is doing is actually more effective than what he thought.”But the trip did not end the debate. [Petraeus’s superior, Chief of CENTCOM, Admiral] Fallon has made the case that Petraeus’s recommendations should consider the political reality in Washington and lay out a guide to troop withdrawals, while Petraeus has resisted that, beyond a possible token pullout of a brigade early next year, according to military officials. The Joint Chiefs have been sympathetic to Fallon’s view.
Right now, it looks like the Joint Chiefs are the defenders of sanity (!), or what remains of it. It certainly makes a difference in your calculations when you’re involved in the enterprise for the long term. If like Reagan you expect Armageddon, or like Bush Œdipal Victory, you don’t care what might happen twenty years from now. You got yours. Would we be better off if our so-called leaders didn’t believe in an afterlife, but followed the Romans in thinking that the only thing we leave is our actions and their effects on the community? But that’s a utilitarian analysis, and a believer in absolute truth wouldn’t find it convincing.
Of course I may have it all backwards. The Joint Chiefs have expressed their interest in having some flexibility to deal with problems outside Iraq. Which could mean Iran. But given that Times article, I hold out hope, foolish though it may turn out to be.
