Skinny-dipping With Alligators

[Woodmonkey]

Washington Diary

Posted April 26, 2004

By James P. Lucier

Bush stymied attempts by the press corps to make him look bad to the public on Iraq.Everybody in this town knows that President George W. Bush would rather go skinny-dipping in the bayou with alligators than submit to the indignities of a White House press conference. His problem is not with the questions but with the questioners. Andy Warhol famously said that everyone is entitled to 15 minutes of fame. But the journalists in the White House press corps have only 15 seconds each to perpetrate a question that will impress their employers and uphold the pose of a fiercely independent and probing press.

When President Bush walked into the East Room on April 15 there was plenty of grim news to be explored. The Marines had encircled Fallujah. The ambitious killer-sheikh Moqtada al-Sadr was holed up in the holy city of Najaf while his cutthroat militia ravaged the countryside. Nearly every day there was another bombing, killing GIs and Iraqis indiscriminately.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 commission had held a parade of high-level witnesses: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller. What had emerged from their testimony was a picture of institutional problems going back generations. A "wall of separation" blocked communication between the CIA and the FBI, instigated partly by well-organized Democratic Party attacks on the CIA beginning in 1975 with the special committee on intelligence headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and escalating through a 1995 secret memo by then deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick directing that even the criminal prosecution of the first World Trade Center bombers would "continue to be walled off" from foreign intelligence investigations.

Of course, the then deputy attorney general is the now member of the 9/11 commission investigating herself. Perhaps she should interrogate herself looking in a hand mirror.

The deeper problem was revealed in the generally excellent 9/11 commission staff analyses presented before the testimony of each of the notables. It was not just that the law and the bureaucrats had erected a wall between the FBI and the CIA; rather, they would not have understood each other anyway. The FBI was from Mars and the CIA was from Venus.

The FBI was still the tough-cop agency of 1940s films noir and 1960s television. Oriented toward collecting evidence for criminal prosecutions by U.S. attorneys in the major cities, its greatest energies were dispersed geographically, with headquarters keeping a benign eye. Paper files sat on desks or were only in the heads of agents who never talked to the gumshoe sitting at the next desk. How could they make distant Washington take seriously the story of a Middle Eastern guy - in Minneapolis no less - who wanted to go to flight school to learn how to fly a commercial airliner but not to land it? Meanwhile, the lofty CIA by statute could work only abroad, collecting electronic intercepts when agents weren't running around exotic climes with cloaks and daggers.

Thus, our intelligence agencies passed each other by night and couldn't even speak the same language. Could this marriage be saved? The problem was exacerbated when Tenet, in obtuse bureaucratic fashion, told stunned members of the 9/11 commission that he wanted to take five years to fix his agency.

So when Bush strode briskly into the East Room there were plenty of legitimate questions. He faced not an eager round of truth-seekers, however, but a bunch of jokesters craftily setting him up for a pratfall, with one crouching behind him, and the other ready to squirt him in the eye with a flower and then send him sprawling backward over the accomplice. They had a whole panoply of wife-beater questions, the moral equivalent of the don't-you-agree-with-me-that-your-administration-has-been-a-failure variety. Bush began with a careful statement of the tense news from Iraq. "They want to run us out of Iraq and destroy the democratic hopes of the Iraqi people," he said. "The violence we have seen is a power grab by these extreme and ruthless people."

Then he went on for 17 minutes concisely making the points he wanted to make before the press got the chance to change the subject. The press fumed. The nation watched the president, and by the time the press got around to its own part of the show, the nation had tuned out.

The questions were not in the least original. Right off the bat an interlocutor, following the Democratic National Committee talking points, stated that "some people" are comparing Iraq with Vietnam and are "talking about a quagmire." Indeed, polls show that "support for your policy is declining," the same journalist said triumphantly, so what was the president going to do about it? Bush dismissed the ploy out of hand and pointedly said that even asking such a question "sends the wrong message to the enemy."

Another said, disparagingly, "It sounds like you will have to add more troops," demanding to know if Bush agreed with him. The question was not an innocent interrogatory, as it may seem. It was clearly an admonition. From day one, the naysayers on Iraq had insisted that this was another Vietnam that would require a huge troop involvement - nay even require a reinstatement of the draft. Now they felt that Bush would have to admit a colossal mistake. But he did no such thing. He deferred to the professional judgment of Gen. John Abizaid, the commander on the ground, implying that the decision should be made by military professionals who know what they are talking about, not by the Washington press corps, which does not. Abizaid would get what he wanted, and we would stay in Iraq as long as necessary.

The effrontery from the press continued. "How do you explain to Americans that you got [it] so wrong?" cried another. "How do you answer your opponents [no doubt referring to the Washington eliterati as much as anybody] who say that you took this nation to war on the basis of what have turned out to be false premises?" Bush patiently explained why his fundamental premise, the defense of the nation, was correct. The press was frustrated. "You never admit that you made a mistake," complained another. "Do you believe that there were any errors in judgment that you made?"

Finally, there came the ultimate question of the anguished white liberal ...

For the rest of the story, go to:

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/...s-670124.shtml