Thoughts on Fiction-Based Reality (Scary!) [View All]

Thoughts on Fiction-based Reality:
Or Does the Future Stand a Chance?

Here's a strange, small tale of our times, as reported from Washington by Guy Dinmore in the sober British Financial Times (Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq security problems). According to an anonymous counterinsurgency expert Dinmore evidently interviewed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a "brutally accurate" picture of the deteriorating situation in Iraq and "its potential dangers." But, writes Dinmore, "a member of an influential neoconservative policy group said that such warnings ‘stop well short of the president.'" Well, actually, not completely short, for Dinsmore then offers the following:


"According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr. Bush recently asked Powell for his view on the progress of the war. ‘We're losing,' Mr. Powell was quoted as saying. Mr. Freeman said Mr. Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave."

Perhaps he even sent Powell -- or, as other rumors have it, a slightly lower-level official -- to the principal. This fits, by the way, with an account in the invaluable Washington insider e-service The Nelson Report. Chris Nelson wrote the following in the first week of January after various officials had returned from discouraging inspection trips to Iraq:


"There is rising concern among senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear ‘bad news.' Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq… building democracy. ‘That's all he wants to hear about,' we have been told. So, ‘in' are the latest totals on school openings and ‘out' are reports from senior U.S. military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasing effective, and their projection that it will ‘just get worse.'"

full story at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2131