The modern incarnation of this paper far too often fails to match the standards it set during the Nixon administration and Watergate. Today’s column by Dan Eggen is a sad example. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120501977.html?hpid=topnews
It begins with a world-class understatement which Eggen could have done far more with, if he had the courage.
George W. Bush is not generally prone to introspection. “I really do not feel comfortable in the role of analyzing myself,” he once said.
Then, immediately, Eggen suggest this pattern has changed…
But with only weeks left in his presidency, the self-analysis has begun.
The column goes on in this vein, as if it were a treatise on “How not to offend the subject you are writing about.” Take the following:
He has admitted to a few previously unacknowledged errors, telling one interviewer that he was “unprepared for war” when he entered office and that his “biggest regret” was the failure of intelligence leading up to the Iraq invasion.
Note first the category “errors”. Like a spelling mistake or choosing the wrong mortgage broker? And what are these ‘errors’?
One – he was “unprepared” for war. I just wasn’t prepared for that bolt of lightening that chance sent down upon me. Can one get more passive than this? Bush, with almost zero critical analysis from Eggen, casts himself as the victim.
And this narrative is deeply false. We know from Richard Clarke that, in an ideological mindset so typical of this administration, the Bush team ignored, marginalized, demoted, fired the intelligence personnel and operations ongoing in the Clinton administration that related to bin Laden and the threat he posed. Bush ignored the briefing that was headlined “al qaeda planning to attack within the US”. While Rice, after 9/11 said “No one could have expected this attack”, they had intel long in hand which described the possible plans of al Qaeda to use hi-jacked planes as weapons.
Bush’s second “previously unacknowledged error”: the failure of intel on WOMD in Iraq. Bush, again, as passive victim. I committed the error of receiving false information from others. Shame on me.
Where is Eggen’s head at here, for god’s sake? What in here is ‘previously unacknowledged’? For four years now, the Bush administration has been trying to escape all blame for the contrast between their claims re WOMD and the complete lack of them by blaiming the intelligence community. Maybe Eggen had a deadline but that is just pathetic.
Then, for Eggen to claim or suggest, as he does, that Bush is “self-analyzing” or admitting some real species of personal failure here is just ridiculous on the face of it. Bush is AVOIDING reflection and any admission of real personal failure.
And once again, the attempted narrative which Eggen facilitates through repetion of Bush’s words without any factual or historical analysis represents incompetent and irresponsible journalism. This is stenography pretending to be something more. We know so much now about this administration’s purposeful attempts to ignore intel and analyses which conflicted with what it wanted to hear, how it set up a special unit under Doug Feith to gather and promote only that intel and analyses which comported with what it wanted to hear, how it purposefully exaggerated threats and information to manufacture consent in the country to facilitate the administration’s designs for war, etc. The point being that the ”intel” was always secondary and was always trumped by the design for war.
What a disappointment the modern Washington Post has so commonly become.
