The W eye-test -- how reliable can it be?
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Stare into these two men's eyes, and what do you see? One is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who prepared to host this weekend's G8 summit with two initiatives. He launched what the European press called a "charm offensive" involving a two-hour webcast, urged on him by his US- and UK-based public relations company, Ketchum, that was designed to counter his worsening anti-democratic, authoritarian image.
He also dispatched a troupe of his security men to handcuff and cart away participants in a human rights conference timed for the G8 gathering.
The other man with arguably interesting eyes is Bernard Kerik, former New York City Police Commissioner, briefly trainer of the new Iraqi police force, and spectacularly failed nominee for the post of US Secretary for Homeland Security. The unraveling of Kerik's once-gloried career reached a nadir last week with his pleading guilty in a Bronx court - and incurring $221,000 in fines and penalties - for accepting a financial gift from a corporation with reputed Mob connections, and failing to report a loan from a property developer.
What these two men have in common is President George W Bush's warm - and very personal - assessment. Bush famously said in 2001 that he had looked into President Putin's eyes and ''got a sense of his soul.'' That led to many cordial meetings and "my friend Vladimir" commendations, even as the real state of US-Russian relations has been seriously cooled by Putin's increasingly dictatorial and nationalistically Mother-Russian policies.
Bush's idiosyncratic yardstick for judging people was first applied to Bernard Kerik when he met him amid lower Manhattan's smoking ruins in September 2001. He was deeply impressed, and welcomed Kerik to the Oval Office in 2003 after his precipitously early return (after only three months) from the training mission he took with Iraq's police - for which he later admitted he had prepared (having no personal Mid-East experience) by watching A&E documentaries on Saddam Hussein.
The President decided then, according to White House staff, that the rough-and-ready ex-cop he had come to call "Bernie" was "a good man". It was just a year later that he nominated Kerik to lead the Homeland Security Department, only to see the nomination collapse in flames. The media raised a frenzy over his sexual affairs, unsavory business associations, and a nanny he employed - and within a week "Bernie" withdrew from consideration.
George W Bush has been making no secret, indeed often sounds proud, of his "gut-check" approach to making decisions, about policies as well as people. To some it can appear a laudable quality. To many of us, though, it's worrisome. One student of the president's psychology (and a far from unsympathetic observer) is Stanley Renshon who combines the disciplines of psychoanalysis and political science at New York's City University. He wrote "In His Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W Bush", published by Palgrave Macmillan. Renshon says, perhaps over-generously: "Bush is a good judge of character but he gets swept away".
Another, newer, book adds to that notion in a disturbing manner. A lesser-noticed observation in Ron Suskind's "The One Per Cent Doctrine" is that Bush has taken an intense and very close personal interest in the progress of intelligence-gathering through the interrogation of captured Al Qaeda suspects.
Take the case of Abu Zubaydah, at one point claimed by the Administration to be a top Qaeda operative, but later seen as a minor, travel agent-type fixer. He was also judged by CIA staff to be mentally ill.
Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth", Suskind writes. The president asked one staff member briefing him: "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out. Zubaydah was "waterboarded" (a simulation of drowning) and he gushed forth a torrent of supposed bombing targets like shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. None of these "leads" panned out to be true when investigated.
What Suskind heard about Bush and interrogation techniques suggests a personal (I hesitate to say "hands-on") involvement that not many US presidents have demonstrated before. Suskind says: "He was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was constantly asking folks inside of CIA, 'What's happening with interrogations? Are these techniques working?' Can we trust what we get? The president ... is involved -- some people say too involved -- in the day-to-day grit of this war on terror."
I have come to be very concerned about the state of the President's gut.