Columns

The truth-telling revolution

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published December 10, 2006

It's not clear what will become of the Iraq Study Group's 79 recommendations for a last-ditch effort to get Iraq on its feet and American combat troops out of a fight that nearly everyone agrees cannot be won militarily. President Bush already has suggested he doesn't care for two of the bipartisan group's key proposals - withdrawing U.S. combat troops by early 2008 and engaging Syria and Iran in a search for a regional solution to the Iraq problem.

Maybe Iraq is too far gone and it doesn't matter what Bush does. The real contribution of this group of political elders may be the brutal candor they brought to their task. They delivered a harsher assessment of how the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team bungled its way into the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam than anything we heard from Democrats in the fall campaign.

Yes, candor is suddenly in fashion in Washington, with the Iraq Study Group being the latest and most stunning example in a city that runs on spin, half-truths and lies. A few days before the group released its report, the president's new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, scored points for candor at his Senate confirmation hearings.

Asked if he thought the United States was winning the war, Gates said, "No sir." At one point he said it was "too soon to tell" if the invasion of Iraq was the right decision. He also said, "It is my impression that frankly there are no new ideas on Iraq."

Commentators and senators of both parties swooned over Gates' candor. And no wonder. Candor is not a word often associated with the Bush administration on the subject of Iraq. I've long wondered how much candid advice, whether in face-to-face meetings or in classified memos, the president gets from his closest advisers in an administration disciplined to stay on message.

We know from a memo recently leaked to the New York Times that Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told Bush that Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki was either "ignorant of what is going on" in Iraq or not up to the job of controlling sectarian violence. A few days after Hadley offered that candid judgment, Bush met with Maliki in Jordan and called him "the right man" to lead Iraq.

Sometimes, candor comes from a slip of the tongue, as when British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is joined at the hip with Bush on Iraq, described the war as "pretty much of a disaster."

My God, even Henry Kissinger, the Christmas bomber who has been advising the White House on the war, recently admitted that a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible. Never mind that Kissinger, who prolonged the Vietnam War, wrote just over a year ago that "victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

And what about those neoconservative hawks who promised a cakewalk in Iraq and now are pointing fingers and saying terrible things about the incompetence of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld gang? Do they deserve points for candor in trying to distance themselves from the president on the Iraq debacle?

I say, bring 'em on. Let them vent their anger with an administration that botched the war they couldn't wait to start.

Richard Perle, one of the chicken hawks, recently told the Nation magazine that had he known what a mess the administration would make of Iraq, he "probably" would have advised the White House to consider "other strategies" short of war. He blames a dysfunctional administration for the disaster Iraq has become.

Another neocon Pentagon insider, Kenneth Adelman, famous for predicting a "cakewalk" in Iraq, told the magazine: "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era."

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the war in Vietnam, waited three decades for his rendezvous with candor. It turns out, McNamara confessed in his memoir, that he knew early on the Vietnam War was wrong but he kept sending young Americans to their deaths because he couldn't bring himself to speak the truth to his president or his country.

Sometimes, candor comes too late to make a difference.

[Last modified December 9, 2006, 20:49:20]