The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks has a piece whose essence I defy any lay reader, professor of logic or palmist to unravel. It's either an exercise in covering official tautology or proof positive that absolutely no one in the Bush administration has any idea what the others are doing. It's unfathomable in its substance, agonizing in its purpose, and ultimately pointless in its drift.
I don't blame Ricks. After all, this is the Bush administration he's covering, so unfathomability, agony and pointlessness are inescapable. And for all we know Mr. Ricks repeatedly pointed out this truism in his original copy, only to have some neocon editor take a delete key to it. Who knows? All we do know is what's reported, which is to say, what's mysteriously murky.
The reader's towering confusion arises from sentences like these: "U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a 'post-occupation' troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout"; followed by, "this plan is emerging as a point of convergence between the two capitals"; followed by, "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and White House spokesman Tony Snow both recently made comments indicating that the administration is thinking along the same lines as military officials here [in Baghdad]."
Military officials there are envisioning a post-occupation policy to be devised -- constitutionally speaking -- here? There's some civilian-military "plan" in need of "convergence"? Was the administration's Bob Gates recently detached from the Pentagon, or the Pentagon here from the military there? Does Tony Snow really dispense hand-puppet signals and issue coded verbal messages from a Washington podium to give a nod to independently designed and executed U.S. military operations in the Middle East?
In short, just who the hell is on first? Who the hell is in charge? Who the hell formulates policy and who the hell executes it?
The White House must "indicate" that it's in agreement with the military, as though the latter is a 19th-century, filibustering, freebooting, mercenary kind of foreign-legion operation that prefers, but doesn't require, the former's imprimatur?
Of course all this reporting orbits around the staggeringly stupid idea of the "Korea model," that vastly dissimilar construct applied to vastly dissimilar Iraq -- the one in which we stay in Iraq forever and accomplish with a smaller contingent that which was unaccomplishable with a larger one.
Brilliance is often defined simply as the ability to see things in a uniquely different way, and this one's so different in its stupidity it almost loops all the way back around to abutting genius. This geometric near-abutment is, no doubt, what the White House and U.S. military have mistaken for the extremely, eccentrically clever.
The article goes on, heaving more stupefactions atop enigmas. For example "a reduction of troops, some officials [military officials?] argue, would demonstrate to anti-American factions that the occupation will not last forever while reassuring Iraqi allies that the United States does not intend to abandon the country."
Go ahead. I dare you. Try to make heads or tails of that split-the-difference contradiction.
Nor do "officials" in this reportorial mix ever take a whack at, for instance, such imponderables as what becomes of the smaller contingent when Iraqi forces are queued up at the bank cashing their unearned paychecks as unpleasant militias are ravishing the countryside. The American contingent just stays in its cot, reading Nietzsche? Or does it call for, oh, a bigger contingent -- one of about, oh, 150,000?
There was also this: "U.S. officials [military officials?] also calculate that underneath the anti-American rhetoric, even Shiite radicals such as cleric Moqtada al-Sadr don't really want to see a total U.S. pullout, especially while they feel threatened by Sunni insurgents."
Now I know I'm just a novice, but here's an idea. Why don't you fellows stop calculating and just call him and ask? And don't tell me you don't have Sadr's number, for that would be as far-fetchedly incompetent as your not knowing, after six years, where Osama bin Laden is.
In closing, I can't express my level of profound regret over never having made a career of the military. Here I have sat, useless and destitute and, in due time, probably homeless because no employer in this brave and illiterate new age cares to hire an obsolete doctor of philosophy in American history, when I could have been building a nice, secure, comfortable pension in some Pentagon cubicle or on some desert isle of needless conflict, dreaming up grotesquely deformed ideas that White House nincompoops and my very own joint chiefs of staff would take seriously.