Tim Grieve puts it well here – “Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.”
There was that depressing Pentagon report the previous week – Iraqi politicians “continue to make little progress toward enacting laws that could advance reconciliation.” Asked Sunday about political progress in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus said on Meet the Press that “there certainly have not been real substantial achievements in that regard so far.” Add that our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, insisted that the situation in Iraq is not yet “hopeless” – but he acknowledged Sunday that there’s “rather clearly” an “absence of progress in the legislative arena.”
But that was Sunday. Monday, June 18, the president talked with Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi - he looked them in the eyes, got a sense of their souls and knows that they’re committed to the best interests of their country and all that.
That reminded Tim Grieve of something else –
No, wait. That’s what Bush said in 2001 after meeting with Vladimir Putin. After talking with Maliki and other Iraqi leaders today, Tony Snow says Bush was “impressed and reassured” by the “seriousness” they showed when it comes to the political work the “surge” is supposed to be making possible.
But one must look closely at what Snow, the White House press Secretary, says, especially since the Iraqi parliament is about to take the summer off –
Q: Can you tell us anything specific about what that reassurance - why he felt reassured, and also address whether or not they’re taking a vacation and whether you know how long that vacation will be?
MR. SNOW: On the second, I don’t believe so; and on the first, no, I can’t give you any specifics. [...]
Q: But, Tony, can you give us some sense of why he felt reassured, given that we’ve heard reassurances before?
MR. SNOW: …and I’m not in a position to go into the details and what they were saying, but there are reasons we think they’re very serious in moving forward on the key items.
Q: But, Tony, we’ve heard that before, many times.
MR. SNOW: I understand. I understand.
Q: I mean, why is there any more reason now to believe that they’re serious about moving forward than there was the last time you said that? Or the time before?
MR. SNOW: … I’m just not going to go into any greater detail, I’m going to let the - that is a sovereign government and I will permit them to make the announcements about how they’re doing and where they’re going.
Q: You think there will be announcements on something about where they’re going?
MR. SNOW: No, I think, again, I’m just going to leave it at that.
You trust the president or you don’t – he was reassured. You don’t matter.
There seems to be an odd calculation going on here, that the public will resent the press asking such questions, because the public just naturally trusts authority. It’s always been that way, and always will be that way. If the president says it is true, well, it must be true. That’s what comes with the office – one of the basic truths of political life in America. Even after all that’s happened in the last six years, or more precisely didn’t, from “Mission Accomplished” forward, the White House seems to think this is a given. It’s something you can count on in the end – when all else fails. It’s a trump card (or the ultimate “get out of jail free” card).
But the axiom that “the president’s word” trumps all may not be… axiomatic. The statements bump up against obvious reality, again and again and again. What was an immutable law, like gravity, isn’t entirely immutable after all. All is flux and you cannot step in the same stream twice and all the rest. No one at the White House reads Heraclites. And there are some good and useful things you can carelessly throw away – implicit trust in this case. Assumptions about what is true and always will be true are always dangerous. Karl Rove dropped out of college for politics. He should have stayed for requirement everyone hated – that basic philosophy course everyone knew was useless. It wasn’t.
The there is the other issue that came up the same Monday. Where have all the emails gone?
The congressman representing those of us in Hollywood, Henry Waxman, issued a curious interim report – on at least the staff of his Oversight and Government Reform Committee did. It seems that far more White House officials than previously acknowledged were given private, off-the-books Republican National Committee email accounts , and wouldn’t you know, the RNC has “failed to preserve messages sent or received” by those officials. Oops.
Among the heaviest users of the RNC accounts was Karl Rove. Waxman’s staff says the RNC has maintained more than 140,000 messages either received or sent through Rove’s RNC account – and more than half of those messages were sent to or received from people with official .GOV accounts. One can assume they were official business, but lloks like tons are missing. The staff report says that the RNC has preserved only 130 Rove messages from President Bush’s first term and none at all from before the fall of 2003.
Waxman’s staff report simply notes that the Presidential Records Act requires the president to ensure that all “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented … and maintained as presidential records.” On the face of it is looks like White House officials used their RNC email accounts “in a manner that circumvented these requirements.” That’s sort of breaking the law.
The staff says, eighty-eight White House officials have had these RNC email accounts, more than the “handful” that White House spokeswoman Dana Perino initially acknowledged in March. Perino subsequently claimed that she didn’t know how many accounts there were when she said there were only a handful – in April, she said that twenty-two current White House officials had the accounts but didn’t seem to know how many former officials had the accounts when they worked at the White House. No one knows anything.
Asked about the charges today, Tony Snow declined to respond – other than to say that the off-the-books email accounts were set up “on a model based on the prior administration” to avoid violating the Hatch Act by ensuring that government facilities – in this case, White House email accounts – weren’t used for political purposes. What is official business and “for political purposes only” is of course the issue here. They seem to be one in the same in this White House.
And there is one really obvious question. What did Alberto Gonzales know, and when did he know it? Waxman’s staff cites evidence that the attorney general had known about the RNC email accounts since at least 2001 – but he didn’t stop White House officials from using them. He gets easily confused about what is “official government business” and what is “screw our political enemies” activity. He just does seem to see the difference.
As for Snow’s response to the press –
Q: We have been through this, but you were saying at the time there were, like, 50 staffers - Waxman is saying, no, it’s more like 88, and there are indications - I mean, 140,000 emails is a lot of emails.
MR. SNOW: That is a whole lot of email.
Q: And that’s just Rove, that’s not all the other folks.
MR. SNOW: That’s a whole lot of email, absolutely right.
When you cannot say “trust us” you just say nothing.
Here’s a summary –
· The number of White House officials using RNC email accounts isn’t a “handful of officials” as claimed by Dana Perino in March. Nor the “50 over the course of the administration” as she later claimed. Rather, the committee has learned that nearly twice that number, at least 88 White House officials have been using the outside accounts.
· Karl Rove himself is responsible for some 140,216 of such emails - at least those which have been preserved. Also accounting for a significant volume of such communications: former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 emails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 emails). Fully 75,374 were sent to or received from individuals using official “.gov” e-mail accounts. That’s “official business” over questionably secure RNC servers, folks.
· Of the 88 officials identified as using such e-mail accounts, 51 of them have miraculously had their e-mail records disappear. Golly! Among the 37 officials for whom the RNC did preserve records, those records evidence “major gaps.” For instance, despite the enormous volume of e-mails known to have been sent or received by Rove during certain periods, for others — like the first term, for instance - only some 130 -mails are available.
· Finally, it appears that - surprise! - the White House Counsel’s office under Alberto Gonazales was fully aware of the use of the RNC e-mail accounts, but took no action to preserve them as required under the Presidential Records Act.
As one wag puts it – “All of which is no surprise, when you consider the Bush White House’s motto, ‘The Rule of Law Sucks.’”
But at least the surge in Iraq is working. Or it isn’t. Tim Grieve, again, here notes that General David Petraeus offers something counterintuitive as proof that the surge is working – the bad guys are starting to kill Americans rather than Iraqis.
Huh?
On “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace asked Petraeus about last week’s Pentagon report on Iraq - the one that said that the “overall level of violence” remained unchanged during the first several months of the “surge.” Then this –
“General,” Wallace asked, “why shouldn’t we back home view that as disappointing?”
Petraeus’ response: “Well, the aggregate level is about the same. We actually have borne the brunt of much more of that, as have Iraqi security forces, and civilians a good bit less. “In fact, one of the metrics that we track, which is sectarian murders and executions in Baghdad, went down … by the end of April, it was down to about a third of where it was back in January. It did come back up as we announced in the month of May a little less than half. That is trending back down again. The fact is that as we go on the offensive, the enemy is going to respond. That is what has happened. Car bombs have been coming steadily down. And as I mentioned, sectarian executions in Baghdad in particular have come down. So again, certainly it is a mix, and that is what I’ve tried to convey with my assessment, that we’re ahead in some areas and we need to do some serious work in others.”
It’s your basic trade off. The bad guys are starting to kill Americans rather than Iraqis. You take what you can get. It’s what we do.
And for what? For the past three years, Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace have ranked one hundred seventy-seven states in order of their “vulnerability to violent and internal conflict and societal deterioration.” The new “Failed States Index” is now out – and Sudan takes home first prize, as it were. They get the gold. Iraq gets the bronze –
“Despite billions of dollars in development and security aid and the continued presence of U.S. troops, Iraq’s position in the Failed States Index dropped for a third consecutive year, leaving it ranked as the second most vulnerable country in the world,” Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace explain in a press release. “Its score diminished in nearly all of the index’s 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators this year, suggesting a broad scope of deterioration in the country.”
As you recall, on “Meet the Press” our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said the situation in Iraq now is “a mixed picture” but “not by any means a hopeless one.” It’s not Sudan, after all.
One would think people would have had enough of this by now. No. There must be another axiom that covers that.
