The Washington Post has a piece telling all of us to get ready for a major change in how the White House frames expectations for the Iraq war — which means yet another case in which this administration blithely casts previous assertions aside as if they never were made at all.
None of this will help the administration’s growing credibility problems here and abroad. In fact, the Washington Post article is almost a medley of bad news on Iraq. Just a few parts of it:
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”
In it’s defense, this does seem more realistic assessment. Policy on paper is never as easy to translate into reality as it looks on paper. The problem for the administration: it had so aggressively insisted that its concept on paper was realistic — and its allies had so vigorously gone after those who said it was not — that it’s going to be hard for them to simply make a new assertion and move on. Their previous comments will be hurled back at them. MORE:
Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. “Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent government.
But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once anticipated. Many of Baghdad’s 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.
Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent…..
The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.
But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq’s future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women’s rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.
“We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”
U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites’ request this month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq’s political process, they said.
ETC. This piece has lots of bad news — if you use the original concept as a yardstick.
But there is another lingering issue. One that may spark some fireworks.
Exactly where are these reports coming from? Surely, they don’t reflect the stated attitudes of President George Bush, who seems to have spent some time the past week contradicting some named and unnamed source members of his administration.
Is the source Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Conservative writer Bill Krystal seems to think so. In a piece in the Weekly Standard he contends Rumsfeld and others were at odds with Bush over calling the “war on terror” the “war on terror” — and that they are behind statements about the light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq. He writes:
The president knows we have to win this war. If some of his subordinates are trying to find ways to escape from it, he needs to assert control over them, overrule them, or replace them. Having corrected the silly effort by some of his advisers to say the war on terror is not fundamentally a war, he now has to deal with the more serious effort, emanating primarily from the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, to find an excuse not to pursue victory in Iraq. For if Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, we need to win there. And to win, the president needs a defense secretary who is willing to fight, and able to win.
Of course, no one knows who the sources are on these stories (except the reporters — and of course we know they and their editors will never EVER reveal their sources..). And there are two ways of looking at it: Krystal’s way (the war can be won and is part of the war on terror) or the story sources’ way (the realistic path is to lower expectations as you work to declare that there have been vital victories on several fronts and get out).
But, on balance, you get this: if in a future crisis (such as Iran, North Korea) administration officials make assertions, there will be far fewer people who will believe them now than believed them during the build up to Iraq — because so many of their you-gotta-believe-us assertions made at the time have been and are being cast aside.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.