INSIGHT Weekly commentary
October 2, 2006
Rumsfeld is not the (only) issue
Bob Woodward's revelatory State of Denial has the Washington press corps aflutter again, chasing down Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld, among others, to provide them with another opportunity to, well, enter a state of denial. Today's denials are by now familiar---for Rice, that she didn't know anything important about the oncoming attacks that finally shook the nation and the world on Sept. 11, 2001; and for Rumsfeld, that various White House intrigues have been afoot to give him the boot.
It's all good fun and typical of current styles of journalism. But the bigger picture is missing. Like the drumbeat from army generals about Rumsfeld's mishandling of the Iraq war---reflected in retired generals' statements and many books such as Thomas Ricks' bestselling Fiasco---the coverage focuses on incompetence. Rummy didn't send enough troops is the usual mantra. Rummy didn't listen. Rummy didn't plan for the aftermath. And so on.
All true. But the bigger story is not incompetence. It is the judgment of the president, the vice president, and the absence of checks and balances on the increasingly grisly affair that is Iraq. We know of Bush's failings, even if they are diverted onto his defense secretary and the heretofore Teflon Lady now at State. Cheney is getting his comeuppance, but is still an effective political ramming rod. What about Congress? Where is the congressional leadership on this war? Where are the Senator Aikens and Fulbrights and Churches of yore? Nowhere to be found. And so the news media, when its spine stiffens a bit, is playing the checks and balances role. That's not the way it should work.
One reason it shouldn't work that way is because the news media is dependent on news---bits of actual information to build their stories on. Information is not always easy to come by. The hard workers---Dana Priest, Tom Ricks, Seymour Hersh, and others---develop good stories that then become controversial in themselves and subject to attack. But what they cannot do, or do warily, is to paint the bigger canvas: the moral constellation that is so badly awry. This is what political leadership should do and is not, from left, center or right.
The American people have come to a jaundiced view of the war with only shreds of information (we don't know, yet, the full extent of the carnage, for example, or the cost), no peace movement to speak of, and precious little insight from the opposition party. Even the press coverage of the war has been countered by Fox (and its imitators) and the endless stream of trivial distractions. That a large majority of the public has come to oppose the war with no leadership for this opposition is astonishing.
And they do so, I submit, not because of Rummy's incompetence, but because it is a losing war, a daily massacre, a breeding ground for terrorism, and a moral failure from the start. That ordinary Americans can recognize this so clearly is, perhaps, the most encouraging piece of news around.
--John Tirman
This is JohnTirman.com