Careening Back to Stupid: A KristoFisk

My recent "The Bodyguard of Lies" piece had been building for a while and was pushed out the door by this little Kristof number. I'll be commenting more on the background issues raised by "The Bodyguard of Lies" in a future post but for now a good Fisking: (my comments in bold)

Op-Ed Columnist: Death by Optimism
November 5, 2003
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

On a visit to Saddam's Iraq a year ago, I wrote a column
that outraged his government. It described officials
burning a Muslim leader's beard and then driving nails
through his head.

The next day I was summoned to a government ministry and
menacingly denounced by two of Saddam's henchmen. But
neither man could speak English, and they hadn't actually
read the offending column. (Imagine officials who don't
read papers but rely on underlings for briefings!)

At that point, my government minder took my column and
translated it for them. I saw my life flash before my eyes.
But my minder's job was to spy on me, and he worried that
my tough column would reflect badly on his spying. Plus, he
was charging me $100 a day, and he would lose a fortune if
I was expelled, or worse.

So he translated my column very selectively. There was no
mention of burning beards or nails in heads. He left out
whole paragraphs. When he finished, the two senior
officials shrugged and let me off scot-free.

That episode underscored to me how difficult it was for
Saddam's government to get accurate information.
Ultimately, Saddam's rule collapsed in part because he
couldn't read Iraq and made decisions based on hubris and
bad information.

This is the very nature of totalitarian dictatorship of course! It's consequences were particularly bad for Saddam because he was a particularly egregious dictator. But Kristof can't say that because it would ruin his forthcoming point.

These days, President Bush and his aides are having the
same problem. Critics complain that they lied to the
American public about how difficult the war would be, but I
fear the critics are wrong: they didn't just fool us - they
also fooled themselves.

Which is that BUSH IS STUPID!!! (I'm having this feeling of Deja Vu all over again!) We've careened back to stupid because the liar argument kept losing traction in the face of facts. But we can't lose face by admitting that so we'll leave it implied that he's a liar also. In fact he's so stupid that he fooled himself and it splattered over on the rest of us -- the unfortunate victims.

Evidence suggests that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have
actually believed that our troops would be, as Mr. Cheney
predicted, "greeted as liberators." The administration
chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking,
and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad
Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan.

Yup, an unfortunate victim of the first snake-oil salesman that came along...

I wish administration officials were lying, because I would
prefer hypocrisy to delusion - at least hypocritical
officials make decisions with accurate information.

Ummm, he's not saying Bush is a liar but I sense a subliminal message developing that stupidity isn't the whole problem after all...

Policy by wishful thinking is crippling our occupation.
Initially, U.S. officials didn't restrain looting because
they regarded it as celebratory high jinks. Then, confident
that security was in hand, they disbanded the Iraqi Army.
They didn't push hard to bring in international forces.

He means the same international forces (you know, French, Russians, and Germans) that are clean as the driven snow ... no -- wait! Weren't they Saddam's chief advisors, enablers and arms suppliers? If you subtract out these supposed "allies" of ours, everyone that's a REAL ally with any troops worth a darn are ALREADY THERE HELPING US. And by the way, the Europeans still have a stinking mess in their own back yard in Bosnia and Kosovo WHERE THERE STILL ARE NO ELECTIONS years and years after things were supposedly cleaned up...

Disbanding the Iraqi Army is at least a point worthy of debate -- but in no way a slam dunk that we shouldn't have done it.

The foreign forces they suggest introducing are Turks,
which adds to my fear that administration officials have
been more deluded than duplicitous. It is a crazy scheme:
anyone who has spent time in Iraq knows that Iraqis will
never accept their former colonial power policing them.

You can't be wrong all the time even if you try -- he has a reasonable point in this paragraph. Of course, what makes up the real negotiations behind the scene is anyone's guess.

Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his
claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the
pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the
spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my
numbers at all."

Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their
model for democracy "hands down," and he and other
officials say that a majority want American troops to stay
at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23
percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent
want the U.S. to leave in a year or less.

He relies on Zogby who is clearly an Arab-it's-all-the-Joooos- fault-party-line partisan. You might also consider what Healing Iraq says: "According to a poll by an Iraqi agency, only 3% of Iraqis want Saddam back and less than 40% want the Americans to leave immediately. Did you even hear about these results?" SPEAKING OF WHICH, FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ ZAYED'S POST!

"I am not willing to say they lied," Mr. Zogby said. "But
they used a very tight process of selective screening, and
when they didn't get what they wanted they were willing to
manufacture some results. . . . There was almost nothing in
that poll to give them comfort."

Ummm, did someone whisper "liar" in my ear?

Sure, we're making some progress in Iraq. A hand grenade
sells for $2.50 now, compared with 10 cents a few months
ago. But U.S. troops now face 25 to 30 attacks daily,
compared with 15 to 20 in September. Last month 33
Americans were killed, twice as many as in September.

This is clearly the use of selective statistics -- one month does not a trend make and all the trend graphs on casualties have been headed down. On the the other hand, it's not at all unreasonable that we'll actually see a spike in attacks and casualties if we really are getting more aggressive in focusing forces on the "Sunni Triangle" -- which by the way IS where the vast majority of the attacks and bad guys are.

In fact, I am quite amazed that the hundreds of thousands if not millions of viscious Saddamites -- likely augmented by A-Team terrorists like Mugniyah himself -- can't make more havoc than they have! I would have thought a helicopter a day would be easy pickings.

One of Mr. Bush's strengths as a politician is his
optimistic nature, but I now fear it is also his central
weakness in governing. Reckless overconfidence led him to
adopt fiscal policies that will leave our children
indebted, and this same cockiness led us into Iraq. Brash
optimism perhaps has its roots in Mr. Bush's hometown,
Midland, Tex., an oil town that regularly rewarded hard
work with a gusher, a place where everybody you meet
displays this same hearty can-do confidence. In Midland,
Mr. Bush unfortunately absorbed the lesson that risks in
the desert pay off.

Dumb Texan. Gets up in the morning and thinks about his cajones all day long.

So the scary thing is, Mr. Bush and his aides may not be
lying when they look at Iraq and boast of a cheering
population that a Western press sourly refuses to
acknowledge. There's a precedent: Saddam Hussein.

Yup, Bush is just one of your run-of-the-mill tyrannical dictators. But look on the bright side -- Kristof finally admitted that Saddam IS a tyrannical dictator!

And don't worry, he's given up the argument that Bush lies ... or has he?