The president must look at reality

Things are not always as simple as they seem. Today's post illustration is an example. It is a photo of a man kneeling on a street painting depicting a dirt pile. It is not an actual hole in the street, but an optical illusion.

Expanding on the idea of staying in touch with reality, I found a wonderful quotation: "Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it." by Jane Wagner, who has written for comedienne Lily Tomlin.

The degree to which our current president (OCP) is out of touch with reality is legendary. It may account for his apparent stress-free demeanor. The most current example is a widely quoted story about the president's "take" on the parallels between the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq. The Financial Times carried this article about our current president's views of what would be success in Iraq, as well as the way OCP sees John McCain's Vietnam experience. This view of reality is so amazingly shallow that you must read it to believe it. To quote:

“We’ll succeed unless we quit,” he said. “One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."
“It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful, and that is an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately.”
. . . “One of the most poignant moments of the drive in was passing the lake where John McCain got pulled out of the lake. And he’s a friend of ours; he suffered a lot as a result of his imprisonment, and yet, we passed the place where he was, literally, saved, in one way, by the people pulling him out.”

What is the actual reality behind the current violence in Iraq? Last Wednesday the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing about the situation there. Several military and civilian officials testified before the senators. The first panel, General John Abizaid and David Satterfield of the State Department, worked very hard to obscure and over-simplify the reality of the war. But the second panel's members, CIA Director General Michael Hayden and Lt. General Michael Maples, were much more forthcoming, clear and candid about the reality on the ground. This Washington Post article, "Violence in Iraq Called Increasingly Complex," is about the generals' assessment of the root causes of the widespread violence in Iraq. It was written by Walter Pincus. To quote,

Attacks in Iraq reached a high of approximately 180 a day last month, reflecting an increasingly complicated conflict that includes sectarian clashes of Sunni and Shiite militias on top of continuing strikes by insurgents, criminal gangs and al-Qaeda terrorists, according to the directors of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"No single narrative is sufficient to explain all the violence we see in Iraq today," Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
Attempting to describe the enemy, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the DIA director, listed "Iraqi nationalists, ex-Baathists, former military, angry Sunni, Jihadists, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda," who create an "overlapping, complex and multi-polar Sunni insurgent and terrorist environment." He added that "Shia militias and Shia militants, some Kurdish pesh merga, and extensive criminal activity further contribute to violence, instability and insecurity."
Although the Bush administration continues to emphasize the role of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Maples described the current situation as "mostly an intra-Arab struggle to determine how power and authority will be distributed," with or without the U.S. presence. Al-Qaeda and foreign terrorist numbers were put at roughly 1,300, while Hayden, pressed by senators, estimated the number of insurgents in the "low tens of thousands." Maples estimated the number of Iraqi insurgents, including militias, at 20,000 to 30,000, and said there are many more who supply support.

The difference between the realities described (in the preceding paragraphs and that of the president's view described at the beginning of my post) is just mind boggling. The primitive statement of OCP over-simplifies the situation, obscures the reality with idealogical rhetoric, minimizes the difficulty of the task, and absolutely denies the reality of what the rest of us can clearly see. It is as if our current president is as blind as the sea urchin from which he evolved. Could there be a clue to the president's problem in the following story? Read it and see for yourself. I quote from the Reuters story about the DNA of sea urchins:

Sea urchins may be blind, but they have the same genes that help people see, as well as genes for a sense of smell and one of the most complicated immune systems in the animal world, researchers reported on Thursday. . .Comparing human genes to their counterparts in other species can help scientists figure out why they evolved, and find ways to help when things go wrong. . .

Confronting the facts of the war in Iraq is the mandate the recent election gave to the 110th U.S. Congress. The incredibly hard upcoming bipartisan work is about committee hearings, budget decisions, intelligence briefings, floor debates, trips to the region, and transparency with the media. It would be a good thing if Congress goes to a five-day work week as a bare minimum. Everybody needs to get to the vital work of confronting reality.

Technorati tags: bush democrats iraq republicans news politics

My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is about the Smithsonian.