More interesting than Bob Woodward’s latest scoop is figuring out why he published it now. Woodward reports on a highly classified briefing that DCI Hayden gave last November to members of the Iraq Study Group. Some members of the study group let Woodward see their notes and agreed to be interviewed (both on and off the record). It’s kind of hard to have a study group of distinguished Americans like Sandra Day O’Connor and James Baker if they are going to blab to the press about their briefings from the Director of Central Intelligence. It’s pretty bad form and will discourage any future efforts to do studies like this in the future. But…well…they did blab, so what did they say?
Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.
For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a “Churchillian” vision of “victory” in Iraq and defend the country’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. “A constitutional order is emerging,” he said.
Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said “the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible,” adding that he could not “point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,” according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
“The government is unable to govern,” Hayden concluded. “We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function.”
Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: “A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable,” he said, “in the short term.”
So, basically, they told Woodward that the President was badly out of touch and that he was ignoring his own intelligence. This is news?
Why are they sandbagging Mr. Bush? This is just one more piece of evidence that the Establishment has decided that the country cannot face its difficulties under the present leadership. It’s exactly what I predicted back in December when I realized that Bush was going to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report. But the Republicans are just dragging their feet in coming to the inevitable conclusion. Bush must go.
