Water Shedding
The Hidden Columnists--David Brooks Edition (04 Dec)

In which Mr. Brooks calls President Bush's speech last week a watershed moment (here's the link to the full column for Times Select subscribers):

It's been interesting to watch the Bush administration grapple with these ambiguities, contradictions and dissonances [ed. note: of conflicting news from Iraq]. When the war first began to deteriorate, the Bushies exuded what Packer calls a "theology of confidence." The president felt he had to display resolve or his team's morale would suffer. Public speeches were relentlessly positive, even to the point of fantasy.

Administration officials felt compelled to assert a mastery of events they plainly did not possess. Sometimes I'd come away from off-the-record conversations and background briefings feeling my intelligence had been insulted, because even in private, officials would ignore realities that were on newspaper front pages.

Then, gradually, an internal glasnost evolved. John Negroponte, then our ambassador, forced people in Washington to confront unpleasant truths. But the internal deliberations were not matched by external candor.

There was a vast gap between the eighth-grade level of some public statements and the graduate-school level of private White House conversations. It was about this time that a bewildered newcomer to the Bush administration interrupted an interview to ask me why I thought there was such a big difference between the probing and realistic President Bush he would see in the Oval Office, and the pat and repetitive Bush he would see at press conferences and on TV.

The president's Annapolis speech last week marks the start of the third phase of the Bush administration's efforts to function amid the fog of the Iraq war. John Burns and Dexter Filkins wrote that the speech was a watershed; for once the Iraq Bush described matched the Iraq his generals confront every day. I'd add that the speech was a watershed because more than ever before, the views the president expressed in public resembled the views he holds in private.

I think of this as the Khalilzad phase, because our current ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, is more intimately involved with all the Iraqi factions than any American has been before, and is taking more sophisticated information back to the White House.

Now when you ask administration officials about how the Iraqi government is doing, you get complex and informative answers: some ministries, like Finance, have competent leadership, while others, like Interior, are a mess. The Iraqi Army is doing a decent job of being a national institution, rather than a front for sectarian militias, but the police forces have been tainted by militia influence.

When you ask about the Sunnis, you also get answers that acknowledge the contradictory nature of reality. The Sunnis are politicking, but they are not renouncing violence. The Sunni political parties are showing surprising organizational ability, even while the Shiite politicians are fragmenting into bickering blocs. The Sunnis generally despise Americans, but they are coming to recognize that the American presence is a useful check on the overbearing Shiites.

There's also more internal debate. For example, some administration officials believe primordial sectarian passions threaten to rip Iraq apart. Others believe that Iraqi politics are sectarian but that Iraqi society is not so bitterly divided.

I still wouldn't say deliberation is this administration's strong suit. Nor is it really possible for anybody to fully understand reality in Iraq, where nothing is as it seems and the myriad of local conditions often don't cohere into one national picture.