A rchive Date
[ 11-04-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4711074/
Tuning Out, But Taking Sides
The Bush team's Know-It-All-ism isn't working. It's a long shot, but some humility might work with both voters and Arabs.
Newsweek
April 19 issue - These are critical days for the United States, and yet public interest in the Iraq war is flat, especially in comparison to the attention the war received a year ago. Part of the explanation is obvious: bad news doesn't sell.
Just as ratings for financial - news networks plummeted after the New Economy bubble burst in 2001, so interest in the Iraq war or the 9/11 commission will inevitably be lower when the whole thing looks so depressing. Who wouldn't rather watch the Saddam statue topple than pictures of burnt Americans on a bridge? But it might be that there's something else at work - something that relates to the frame of mind that the public now brings to politics and international issues.
Recall how obsessed the Nixon White House was with how things might "play in Peoria."
In the great Washington spectacles of old - from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings to the 1973 Watergate hearings to the 1987 Iran-contra inquiry - the public stood poised to go either way, depending on the impression conveyed from the witness table. But last week there didn't seem to be many viewers who were on the fence about Condoleezza Rice's testimony. What she said - even how she "played" on television - was curiously irrelevant.
It's a Red and Blue thing.
Those who like President Bush thought Rice did generally well and those who don't like him thought she came up short. Everyone wears "D" or "R" monogrammed glasses when they turn on the TV.
Then the spinners, who have become more like angry cheerleaders, go to work, which doesn't change anyone's mind but gets each team more riled up. The left tries to catalog "perjury" by Rice, which even Richard Clarke does not allege.
The right (headline from the New York Post last week: THE LADY IS A CHAMP) cannot admit that her claim that the Bush White House saw terrorism as an "urgent" matter pre - 9/11 is wildly at odds with about a thousand facts. The people in the middle - who will swing the election - are too busy to watch, which means that the political significance of this spring's events is still unclear.
Until the Clinton impeachment trial, most of the partisanship was rooted in the capital. But the polarization has gone national now, fed by know-it-all pundits (insert mea culpa here) and military analysts. No TV chat-show booker who wants to keep his job puts someone on television who says "I don't know the answer to that question" or "I'm not sure what the U.S. government should do now in Iraq."
But here we are in Iraq, where the stammering, inadequate TV response is the truth on the ground.
We don't know the answers to the scary questions ("What if the Sunnis and Shiites team up against us?") and no one has a good idea of what the government should do. There's a disconnect between our predictable political conversation and the fresh ideas we need. The coulda and shoulda issues raised by John Kerry and the Democrats are fine in an election year, but the finger-pointing doesn't do anything to get the president - and the country - out of this colossal mess.
Maybe Senate Republicans could help by holding hearings where the best experts on the region toss in their best ideas. Offer twice the pay to reconstitute the Iraqi Army we so stupidly disbanded? If that's a bad idea - and it might be - let's find out why.
But that would mean admitting that the Know- It-All-ism isn't working.
Bush's idea in 2000 of a "humble" role for America in the world is long gone, replaced by a crew of self-satisfied policymakers who are sure that, even now, admitting the smallest error in judgment would disadvantage them politically, not just in the November election but in the Arab world. That's old thinking; some new humility might work with both American voters and Arabs, but don't expect them to try it.
Why not?
Because the president and his team continue to confuse morality with moral certainty; they confuse the essential rightness of fighting terrorism around the world with the morally neutral matter of whether they know the best way to do it. Morality could understandably lead to Bush's Wilsonian drive to reshape Iraq; moral certainty is when anything can be said or done to achieve that end and win the election.
Uncertainty is the only certainty now - in politics and terror. What are Al Qaeda's political calculations? They have a habit of acting shortly before big presidential elections. Consider the attack on the USS Cole, shortly before the 2000 vote, and last month's election-eve bombing in Madrid.
The screenwriter William Goldman once said "nobody knows anything" in Hollywood. The same is true of the whole world now.
When confronted with it, as we have been lately, it's a shock, and causes withdrawal for some, a moment of reflection for others. Let's use the confusion. Necessity demands that our leaders open their minds and, in Lincoln's phrase, "think and act anew." When the political air is less stale, maybe we'll tune in more.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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