Great moments in unconscious irony

On the eve of a summit between president Bush and Iraqi prime minister Maliki, someone at the White House leaked a memo describing Iraq’s prime minister as either clueless, deluded or impotent. The leak may have some bearing on the postponement of the Bush-Maliki meeting, although the primary reason may be the decision by followers of Muqtada al Sadr to protest the get-together by suspending their participation in the Maliki government.

But the meeting itself ranks way high on the “who cares?” scale, significant only in the fact that the two “leaders” are meeting in Jordan because Iraq is too dangerous. We’re here for the unconscious irony list, the first item on which is the leaked memo, and the second, an op-ed from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien.

The memo was written by national security advisor Stephen Hadley, who took over from Condoleezza Rice the role of ineffectually coordinating the nexus of military, diplomatic and executive lunacy that characterizes the Bush administration. Here’s the money shot.

Among the concerns voiced in the memo was that Mr. Maliki was surrounded by a small group of advisers from the Shiite Dawa Party, a narrow circle that American officials worry may skew the information he receives.

Let’s try another version: “Among the concerns voiced in the memo was that Mr. Bush was surrounded by a small group of advisers from the hospital for the criminally insane, a narrow circle that humans worry may skew the information he receives.”

On to Mr. O’Brien, the deputy editorial page editor for the Plain Delaer. First, a little background: a few weeks ago the Iraqi health minister said that some 150,000 Iraqis had been killed by insurgents. If an equal number have died at the hands of the US and Iraqi militaries, the Iraqi police and the various death squads infesting the country, the invasion and occupation and consequent events are responsible for the deaths of 300,000 Iraqis. At 12 pints each that’s 450,000 gallons of blood, enough to fill fifty tanker trucks, or an Olympic-size swimming pool to a depth of five feet, or the enormous shark habitat at SeaWorld San Antonio (which would, blood and all, make a wonderful retirement home for Bush administration luminaries and their enablers in the wider world).

That’s a lot of blood, but not enough for O’Brien, who thinks that “[g]iven sufficient time and sufficient freedom of action, there is absolutely no doubt that the U.S. military would stabilize Iraq.” This is the Vietnam trope, in which freedom of action is a euphemism for “kill ‘em all” and only spineless politicians and squeamish voters stand in the way of Victory. Irony enough under ordinary circumstances, given that the president shows absolutely no sign of bowing to public pressure and we don’t have the million or so troops necessary at this point to impose even the illusion of order upon the country, but again, not enough for O’Brien.

The choices, then, are two: Accept defeat and leave, or apply more force and stay. Accepting defeat would tell our Islamic foes that their plan to convert the world by force is on track.

Whatever else one might say about O’Brien, there’s no faulting his economy of language; you won’t find a higher ratio of stupidity/word than that, and the obvious but completely oblivious implication that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was planned by our “Islamic foes” as the keystone of their effort to forcibly convert the world is beyond priceless. Hadley’s effort is world-class but O’Brien is operating at an entirely different level.

A sidelight, or maybe a sideshow, to the hilarity in the Hadley memo is the question of who leaked it on the eve of the meeting (which is now looking as though it might not happen at all). The Times attributes it only to “an administration official” and describes the damage control team as “senior administration officials,” but other than that there’s no clue who the culprit might be or why he or she chose last night to leak the thing, or rather why he or she decided to make an effort at sinking the summit. The Times reporters chose, as usual, to ignore their own guidelines on explaining to readers why they granted anonymity and to what degree they’re obscuring the identity of the leaker, so they’re no help.