Everyone Gets a Trophy, No One Gets Last Place
In the Washington Post today, columnist Fred Hiatt dissects the Senate Intelligence Committee's recent report concluding that the President had misled us into the Iraq war. Hiatt calls this a bogus storyline. According to Hiatt the real culprit in the Iraq debacle is not the Administration's duplicity but the intelligence failure before the war. Hiatt notes that the SIC's report even concedes that there was intelligence supporting the President's view. So let's not pile on the President, let's blame the intelligence community.
Hiatt is both right and wrong.
He is right in the sense that you will never find a case where the intelligence community said "black" and Bush said "white." If that is the only type of deception you recognize, the President is fully vindicated. However, if you put our Commander in Chief to a slightly higher standard of candor, Hiatt's conclusions fall apart. While you will not find any examples of any obvious lie, a review of the record does reveal numerous examples of exaggerations, of choosing favorable interpretation over another, of cherry picking intelligence despite the misgivings of the intelligence community, of relying on superficial intelligence without bothering to dig deeper or ask harder questions, and of just plain fear mongering. Add that to the fact that the "intelligence" we are talking about was largely ordered up by Douglas Feith and V.P. Cheney like a sizzler at a steakhouse, and it is difficult to conclude that the Administration is blameless.
When I read Hiatt's piece, I initially suspected that he is simply trying to shed light on the woeful state of our intelligence community, a situation that could easily be ignored if we just blame the President. The more I think about it, however, the more I suspect that this is really the Washington equivalent of "everyone gets a ribbon and no one gets a black eye." By painting Iraq as some bureaucratic failure and not the product of an undisclosed agenda or poor judgment, Hiatt lets the President and us off the hook. He offers us a bucket of "who knew?" to throw on the accusation that we unlawfully and unjustly went to war. Its an understandable response. Blame means accountability and no one wants accountability on this.
But ultimately, this is a case of "spare the rod spoil the child." We will likely spend the better part of the next decade thinking up excuses and explanations for the last six years that will blame everyone but us and our government. We are like kids trying to explain the broken window and the baseball on the kitchen floor. The wind, the batter, the poor quality of the glass will all be to blame. I am sure this will make us feel better for a little while. But it just postpones the inevitable and more seriously just postpones acceptance of a judgement the rest of the world has already made.
Maybe we ought to just 'fess up and try to fix the window.
Hiatt is both right and wrong.
He is right in the sense that you will never find a case where the intelligence community said "black" and Bush said "white." If that is the only type of deception you recognize, the President is fully vindicated. However, if you put our Commander in Chief to a slightly higher standard of candor, Hiatt's conclusions fall apart. While you will not find any examples of any obvious lie, a review of the record does reveal numerous examples of exaggerations, of choosing favorable interpretation over another, of cherry picking intelligence despite the misgivings of the intelligence community, of relying on superficial intelligence without bothering to dig deeper or ask harder questions, and of just plain fear mongering. Add that to the fact that the "intelligence" we are talking about was largely ordered up by Douglas Feith and V.P. Cheney like a sizzler at a steakhouse, and it is difficult to conclude that the Administration is blameless.
When I read Hiatt's piece, I initially suspected that he is simply trying to shed light on the woeful state of our intelligence community, a situation that could easily be ignored if we just blame the President. The more I think about it, however, the more I suspect that this is really the Washington equivalent of "everyone gets a ribbon and no one gets a black eye." By painting Iraq as some bureaucratic failure and not the product of an undisclosed agenda or poor judgment, Hiatt lets the President and us off the hook. He offers us a bucket of "who knew?" to throw on the accusation that we unlawfully and unjustly went to war. Its an understandable response. Blame means accountability and no one wants accountability on this.
But ultimately, this is a case of "spare the rod spoil the child." We will likely spend the better part of the next decade thinking up excuses and explanations for the last six years that will blame everyone but us and our government. We are like kids trying to explain the broken window and the baseball on the kitchen floor. The wind, the batter, the poor quality of the glass will all be to blame. I am sure this will make us feel better for a little while. But it just postpones the inevitable and more seriously just postpones acceptance of a judgement the rest of the world has already made.
Maybe we ought to just 'fess up and try to fix the window.
posted by Jack Reed at 4:53 PM
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