A comprehension test:
In November 2006 the CIA director acquainted the Iraq Study Group with his creeping realization that “the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible.”
He further informed them he could find no “milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around.”
The director then emphasized his assessment through restatement: “The government is unable to govern. We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function.”
And yet again: “A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable in the short term.”
Since we had been at it for years and still the director could find no “milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,” the long term, then, appeared to lie well beyond the president's second term and perhaps sometime in the next century.
An endless, bottomless trash bin of human and fiscal devotion to Iraq, then, right? That’s how I read it, or in the Iraq Study Group's case, heard it.
But let's go a bit farther.
Though we can also assume the president had read or heard an identical assessment from his CIA director, this is how he put it to the Iraq Study Group in his interview with that esteemed assemblage, and on the same morning of the CIA director's interview:
“A constitutional order is emerging,” pluckily reported Mr. Bush, lacing his either sunny psychosis or deliberate deception with repeated references to impending “victory.”
In short order the president ordered up more U.S. troops to further the cause of Iraq's nonexistent emerging order, which Congress -- in possession of two intelligence committees that also had heard the CIA director's lugubrious testimony -- promptly approved.
That was seven months ago; the Iraq Study Group interviews, nine months ago. The “main sources of violence” in Iraq, which the CIA director detailed to the Group “in this order,” were “the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda” -- an oppressive order the president has routinely reversed in his public presentations.
Months later, the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and al Qaeda's presence are more oppressive than ever.
Meanwhile Congress can't legislatively guarantee that our troops receive an occasional and requisite respite; the third branch of government is busy denying law suits filed by citizens who've had their civil liberties violated in the course of the president's war on slogans; and the Fourth Estate, representing the people, allows the president to b.s. and chuckle and good-buddy his way through press conferences, such as yesterday's, which was a national embarrassment, another national avoidance of accountability, a national joke.
You know what? Given the CIA director's aforementioned, unspecified allusions to a dysfunctional government, I would have failed the comprehension test. For it is increasingly clear that “the government” that “is unable to govern” is not at all the one I thought he was referring to.
By the way, since early November -- since the CIA director's profoundly dark appraisal and the president's psychotic break/deliberate deception and Congress' splintered performances and the media's polite “grillings” -- nearly 800 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq.