"Realism" rears again - to a slap-down?
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Retailing at just shy of eleven dollars, the new 160-page quickie paperback from the Vintage division of Random House has a title that's none-too-snappy (and hard to punctuate) -- "The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach".
The advance marketing was as hesitant as the title. The heaviest-hitting possible promoter, the Bush Administration (which arguably had the greatest interest in seeing the report do well, since good ole reliable Jim Baker's ten-person Group could offer political cover to get the President off his Iraq hook) leaked and spun anxiously to dampen, not build, expectations around the report.
Vintage have not publicized the size of their print-run (now already two print runs) but they point somewhat over-enthusiastically to the phenomenal book sales of the 9/11 Commission's report as a precedent. The White House coolness demonstrates, though, that whatever sales numbers they achieve the authors really have a target audience of only one - our Reader-in-Chief in the White House.
George W Bush has a longstanding reputation as a reluctant reader, much preferring staff-crafted distillations to any original material, even though a radical make-over to this image was attempted this last summer, presenting an alleged presidential vacation booklist of no less than 25 titles, including Albert Camus' The Stranger ... and a surprising claim from Press Secretary Tony Snow that he conversed with his boss "on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre". Trouble is -- Bush may read more now, but he seems to allow even less in to affect his thinking.
We know - from his own profession of respect for his generals' reports - that he would not have missed Maj-Gen William Caldwell's briefing from Baghdad, stressing that al Qaeda in Iraq "have become extremely disorganized. I would question at this point how effective they are at all." And yet Bush has continued insisting that al Qaeda is primarily responsible for Iraq's violence.
The President's own National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley wrote for him that Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action”. Nonetheless Bush proclaimed al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq" at their awkwardly delayed Amman, Jordan meeting.
(Remember the presidential eye-test, previously used to validate Russia's Vladimir Putin, and the Republic of Utter Disgrace's Bernard Kerik? Well it seems the Decider is continuing his tradition of ocular assessment with al-Maliki - at one point he told the Iraqi PM that he had come to "look you in the eye" - and he still likes whatever he saw.)
And as though delivering a corrective to commentators like myself who have suggested that some sane pragmatism could sidle into even the Bush world-view, the President launched a pretty clear preemptive strike against the Study Group's findings just as they were gaining advance favor as "realistic".
"I know", Bush told the press, "there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq." But, he insisted, "we're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done, so long as the government wants us there ... this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it." And all of this came way ahead of what the New York Times called, in rather surprised, disapproving tones, his "push back against" the Report's reccomendations.
I guess everyone's now claiming to be the real realists.
INCREASINGLY, VIDEO CAN EMBARRASS AUTHORITY. As I wrote in the last Media Beat column, we've seen that firmly demonstrated from 1991's infamous police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles to more recent, YouTube'd scenes of evident LAPD brutality.
Now lawyers for alleged terrorist Jose Padilla have distributed images of their client, once defined by the government as an "enemy combatant" and held in a US Navy brig, now reclassified as a conspirator in a federal criminal case in Miami, being taken in chains from his solitary confinement to a dentist appointment.
Humiliating perhaps, but maybe not cruel and unusual punishment, if we believe government officials. Padilla's lawyers understandably want it all seen as part of a pattern of psychological maltreatment that has rendered their client mentally unfit to stand trial.
But there's more - and it's almost as striking a development as the surprise discovery during the Watergate investigations that Richard Nixon had recorded just about everything in the Oval office. Bundled in with the Padilla lawyers' defense tactic comes the revelation that terrorist suspects' actual interrogation sessions have been video-ed. A psychiatrist, Dr Angela Hegarty, states in a defense affidavit that Padilla is too "traumatized" to look at tape of his own interrogation (the tape has been released to the defense, but remains classified).
Stand by for a huge fight over access to such footage of other detainees. Human-rights monitor Scott Horton of the New York City Bar Association expects attorneys for al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo to press for tapes of their clients' interrogations to be made available. "This is going to wind up being an enormous issue", says Horton.
Will we get to see what “waterboarding”, American-style, actually looks like?