disconnected

At this point, it's a little hard to distinguish who is further from the truth about Iraq, the Bush Administration or the Iraq Study Group. 

Matt Taibbi gives us some much-needed perspective about the long-awaited ISG Report:

The Baker-Hamilton report is being praised for its cautious, sensible, bipartisan approach to the Iraq problem (Time magazine even called it "genius") but actually all it is a tacit recognition of this pass-the-buck dynamic in Washington. Because there is currently no way to even think about ending the actual problem without someone in Washington having to eat a very big bucket of shit, both sides have agreed, in the spirit of so-called bipartisan cooperation, to avoid thinking about ending the problem in the immediate future. Instead, the official policy in the meantime, bet on it, will end up being some version of a three-pronged strategy that involves 1) staying the course or even increasing the amount of troops temporarily 2) seeing what happens in '08, and 3) revisiting the issue after we see who wins the White House two years from now.

Baker-Hamilton wasn't about finding solutions to the Iraq problem. It was about finding viable political solutions to the Iraq problem. Since there are none, it punted the problem to the next administration. Maybe the war will be real to those folks and they'll actually do something. Don't hold your breath.

But even given the cautious, change-nothing, inoffensive tone of the report, the President Who Chews With His Mouth Open is already trying to dig a trench around its recommendations.  Why?  Cos he's smarter than all those folks with their fancy degrees and jobs and accomplishments.  Andy Card says so:

Andrew H. Card Jr., the president’s chief of staff until last spring, said that whatever Mr. Bush did in Iraq would probably fall short of many of the commission’s recommendations, and that he was likely to continue making decisions that he believed were right even if unpopular. Referring to Mr. Bush’s secret intelligence briefings, Mr. Card said, “The president by definition knows more than any of those people who are serving on these panels.”

Um, what did you just say?

 “The president by definition knows more than any of those people who are serving on these panels.”

Oh, well, I feel better about it already, don't you?

Dude, the president, "by definition", has a head so pointed he can't even read a goddamn menu.  Now, what part of "The Iraq War is an unmitigated cock-up of global proportions" do you not understand?  The president "by definition" didn't know enough to keep us from getting into this mess.  What on god's green earth makes you think he knows more about how to get us the fuck out than, well, anybody?

Not that it would be hard to best the ISG panel on their Middle East acumen.  Back to Taibbi:

And so, when faced with an unsolvable or seemingly unsolvable political conundrum, most politicians feel there's only one thing to do. You appear onstage with your rival party's leader, embrace him, announce that you're going to find a "bipartisan" solution together, and then nominate a panel of rotting political corpses who will spend 18 months, a few dozen million dollars, many thousands of taxpayer-funded air miles, and about 130,000 pages of impossibly verbose text finding a way for both parties to successfully take the fork in the road and blow off the entire issue, whatever it was.

"Rotting political corpses" indeed.  But hey, that description sounds just like the 9/11 Report.  And the Katrina Aftermath Report.  And, and…

But really, the Baker-Hamilton circle-jerk does absolutely nothing to address the reality on the ground in Iraq, which has spiralled so wildly out of control that most of us can't even conceive of the chaos and brutality.

Here are some statements by journalists about the conditions in Iraq as compiled by the Columbia Journalism Review, which I found via Friday's Romenesko:

Christopher Allbritton
Freelance writer

I hope I contributed to the world’s understanding of what’s happening in Iraq. I would like to avoid going back to Iraq. I’m not personally interested in the story anymore. Burned out. With too few breaks. Most of the world is waiting for this train wreck to run its course. Anyone can see it’s going from bad to worse to truly terrible.

Dexter Filkins
The New York Times

When you’re a target, it’s different — it’s weird, you know? It’s really strange. Any number of times I’ve been in a car driving down the road, and suddenly a car will come after me, and you don’t want to hang around and figure out why they’re trying to run you off the road or cut you off. And I’ve been chased, cut off, guys with guns, the whole thing. It so suddenly kind of turns on you. You will not unwind while you’re there in Iraq. You just can’t. You’re just kind of cranked up for however long you’re there. You’re just kind of wound up. The last time I was there I did seventeen weeks, so I stayed out for a long time, but — so it’s usually a couple of months and you’re pretty fried. But it’s mostly the isolation. It’s just very, very isolated. There’s nothing much else to do except work. You’re in this house, cooped up a lot of time. You’re working all the time. You really have to work a lot because everything moves so slowly that if you do sixteen hours, it’s like you moved this gigantic wheel one little click. So the next day you work another sixteen hours and the wheel moves another click. It’s all so slow now and truncated that it just takes more and more labor to get the smallest thing done.

Farnaz Fassihi
The Wall Street Journal

When I left Iraq for the first time — you know, the tensions in Iraq are so extreme. We were constantly, twenty-four hours a day, on a state of high alert, survival mode. That situation, constantly under tension, you don’t really sleep well. You don’t know what’s going to happen the next moment. In addition to feeling that for yourself, you’re also worried about your colleagues. I was very worried about the Iraqi staff. Being responsible for security of the Iraqi staff. And all the bad things, the terrible things you cover. All the horror, all the misery of the Iraqis.

Every time I left Iraq, I would just stay in a hotel in Amman for two days doing nothing. I couldn’t immediately jump on a plane home. For me, anxiety would come in the most unusual places. Like suddenly in a commercial flight. Or for a really long time, I couldn’t sit by the window in New York. Or anywhere. When I’d walk into a restaurant I’d constantly choose the furthest seat from the window. Because I always associated windows with smashing. I’d seen it happen several times where a car bomb had gone off and smashed the windows. So you avoid sitting by the window.

We talk to each other. Journalists talk to each other about these kind of things. That’s one thing . . . .

But hey, you know, the Beltway crowd has never met a problem too urgent to kick down the road for someone else to handle, have they?  So, thousands of people on both sides may die horribly before anything actually changes or any real action is taken.  Who cares?  Our government has elaborate political cover to erect, and fast!  It must be absolutely positively assured that no one's careers will get set ablaze, nobody's going to make any sudden moves, and no real blame will get assigned for what has truly mushroomed into our greatest national disgrace.

I for one feel that my tax dollars couldn't be better spent.  How about you? 

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