MysteriousFaith

The Iraq Study Group Report

Have you ever had the experience of a friend coming to you for advice, and after giving it, you think “if what I just told him was something he didn’t know, then this guy is in real trouble.” If you have, then you will recognize your feeling upon completing the Baker-Hamilton led Iraq Study Group (ISG) and their much-touted report, except this time the stakes are slightly higher than when your cousin asked you if you would mind investing in a Nigerian money-exchange scheme he found waiting for him in his email box one morning.

Seen properly, this is less an observation about the ISG’s inadequacies as it is a damning statement about our dear leader, the block-headed dullard we get to call President Bush for another two years. If you have been paying attention to his press conferences, usually an assault on reason and lucidity and now reminiscent of a child’s belief that simply talking louder or repetitively will make your point more clearly, you may have noticed Bush’s recent demeanor has become increasingly hostile and one-dimensional. Reporters who ask him to reflect on the lessons learned from Iraq – what most of us would assume should include a litany of insights – at best get aphorisms or philistine analogies between George Washington and George Bush. This latter comment from Bush’s last press conference of 2006 amounted to an attempt on his part to argue that because the record was still out on our first President, George Washington, people should accommodate Bush’s policy in Iraq. What exactly history has failed to record about Washington that is relevant to Bush was unexplored, probably in no small part because the press corps was reeling at the false-bravado and unintelligible hubris behind the analogy.

That it would take the ISG to get Bush to seriously re-evaluate his position on Iraq should come as no small surprise given it took a particularly poor showing in the mid-term Congressional elections to change leadership at the Pentagon. Whether the ISG can actually impact either Bush or the situation in Iraq remains to be seen. Recommendations include those who are less-than-illuminating, such as “An essential part of reconstruction efforts in Iraq should be greater involvement by and with international partners, who should do more than just contribute money. They should also actively participate in the design and construction of projects.” (Recommendation 65). Or this little gem, “The United States should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq.” (Recommendation 40).

If one looks closely, several of the ISG’s recommendations are already being followed. Bush’s recent announcement that we will be increasing the size of the military originates from a set of recommendations the ISG makes regarding our overall military readiness and the need to re-equip the Army in particular. For those who want to believe in the unquestioned military advantage the US enjoys, it would be well worth their time to think about how significantly the invasion and occupation of Iraq has impacted our military readiness. While we enjoy unparalleled dominance in the air and on the sea, this dominance becomes less noticeable when we must occupy land.

The paucity of profundity from the ISG is not its fault; rather, any such blame belongs squarely on the shoulders of our President for putting smart and influential people in situations where their advice has to be reduced to points which should be otherwise self-evident. The ISG is never more damning than when it points out that we have a grand total of 33 Arabic speakers at our Baghdad embassy, only 6 of which can be called fluent. (pg. 92). Similarly, when the ISG illustrates that to fight the insurgency we must understand the insurgency, and to do so is problematic when the Defense Intelligence Agency has less than 10 analysts with more than 2 years on the job, we get a small insight into why Iraq has turned into such a nightmare. Being against the Iraq War took many forms, ranging from unenlightened pacifism to a suspicion that any Bush-led administration should keep its sight set on smaller game due to limitations unique to its leader’s management and planning competencies.

That Bush is a weak President is not what makes him so offensive. It is that he pretends to be strong when he does not understand what he is supposed to be strong about; that he makes superficial attempts to imbibe from the well of history whose lessons he does not understand; that his weakness reveals itself in what high-school boys immediately recognize as school yard machismo. Bush has nowhere to go for another two years, and any changes we make in Iraq will only come after calamitous results (as our policy post-invasion all too-eloquently shows).

Presciently, Justin A. Frank, M.D. wrote in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, that “Such rigidity of thought is not motivated by simple stubbornness; the untreated alcoholic, consumed with the task of managing the anxieties that might make him reach for a drink, simply can’t tolerate any threat to his status quo. Self-protection takes precedence over self-examination; it’s safer to hold onto an idea that has served him in the past than to try a new one that might not work. The need to protect the status quo also fuels swift and vigorous responses to any threats that may challenge it – often resulting in responses that are out of proportion to the magnitude of the actual threat.” (pg. 44) Frank saw several years ago what most Americans now see for themselves, that Bush’s so-called leadership is really a poker-face he puts on to bluff himself – to convince only his own conscious that he is not the failure, the inept thinker, the shallow man, that history will record him as. Unfortunately for us, for our servicemen, and Iraqis, Bush has two more years with which to continue playing poker.

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• December 24, 2006

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