Most of the media coverage this week seems to be glossing over the significant detail that the U.S. investment in Iraq, in terms of personnel and dollars, will continue.  Instead of uniformed troops from the military, we’ll have 15,000-16,000 people there in the form of other government employees and private contractors.  We’ll be spending almost $4 billion there in 2012.  These numbers are lower than what we’ve been investing, but they are not small numbers, and they still represent a significant commitment on the part of U.S. taxpayers, let alone on the part of the soldiers still on the ground.  We can’t afford to start thinking or talking as though our involvement in Iraq is through.

It also seems appropriate that when we talk about the human life lost in the course of the U.S. presence in Iraq, we avoid artificial exclusions based on nationality.  The story and cost of war is incomplete if you only recognize the count of killed and wounded on one “side” of any conflict.  As we consider this particular milestone, let us reflect on the totality of what has been sacrificed, taken or destroyed along the way.

It’s certainly too little too late for someone who was often the public face of a government that we now know was actively misleading its own citizens about Iraq, wielding its power to practice malicious (not to mention illegal) personal attacks and then covering them up. If you believe in the power of the press and public opinion to help shape U.S. policies (or to at least hold the government accountable for its actions), and if you know how much the press regurgitated White House statements without critical evaluation or follow up in the last seven years, then you might say that Mr. McClellan is fairly directly responsible for a lot of unnecessary death in the world.

Even with the disgust and distaste in my mouth, I still appreciated reading his account of his years with George W. Bush, and his take on the problematic culture of “permanent campaigning” in Washington, and it reminded me of an important point: the federal government is just made up of individual people who are flawed, stubborn, vulnerable, scared, and fragile in the same kinds of ways all the rest of us are. (Unfortunately, as McClellan makes all too real in his account, when those personal flaws translate into the flawed foreign policy of a world superpower, or into the poor representation of a citizenry’s actual needs and desires, the impact is at a whole new level of tragedy.)

McClellan writes more in the style of a college expository essay than a personal narrative, using “As I have shown in this book…” or “As I explained in Chapter such and such…” throughout. I was worried when I saw a few of the glossy pages in the center of the book with photos containing images from his childhood that he would (as some other tell-all writers have done) spend the first third of the 323 pages taking us on a tour of his upbringing, trying to connect statements he made as Press Secretary to the time when his uncle wouldn’t let him have a candy bar he wanted, etc. But mercifully, he minimizes that kind of narrative and gets straight to the point of the book as it’s been pitched: an insider’s take on how the Bush White House does business.

There are few moments of stunning insight or reflection, but the book still manages to be shocking and noteworthy in the sense that it confirms what Bush administration critics have felt for many years: this is a Presidential administration that sets its own goals based on ideological self-confidence, and then make the facts and intelligence and talking points and various departments of the Executive Branch all fall in line behind those goals. It ignores public outcry, mass demonstrations, and personal appeals, and punishes those who are anything but 100% loyal and on message. It “stays the course” even when all other conventional wisdom and practical advice says otherwise. And it does all of this through the manipulative and agenda-driven personalities of a few individuals at the heart of the administration.

I suppose that the one area where I was surprised was in McClellan’s own seemingly authentic contrition about his actions. He clearly knows the tradecraft of spin well enough that he could have manipulated the story into a narrative where he had no blame to share, or even where every actor involved was trying to do the right thing but the pressures and constraints of governing just didn’t go as well as it could. But instead McClellan doesn’t hesitate to say that he should have been paying better attention, he should have been more assertive, he shouldn’t have believed some assurances he was given, he shouldn’t have said the things he did. He also isn’t afraid to point his finger at individuals within the administration and say “this person clearly didn’t live up to the standards of their office” He stops short of personal attacks, but only because he seems conflicted about his relationships. For example, he vacillates back and forth between admiration of George W. Bush’s personality and ideals, and sharing a candid disapproval of Bush’s approach to being President and the significant personal flaws that this represents.

McClellan makes a few suggestions for how the Presidency could be repaired, and how George W. Bush should make amends with the American people. He even writes out a statement that the President could make about what happened in Iraq in the name of healing the country’s deep divides:

An honest statement of the facts would have served Bush better — something like, “We now know that Saddam was a less serious threat than we believed…What is important now is that we continue to work together on a consensus way forward to a successful outcome – one we can all agree on. That is how we, here at home, will best serve our troops fighting abroad and honor the sacrifices that so many of them have made and are making.”

Of course this is a tad idealistic, since if the President and his advisers really valued a consensus process, political unity and solutions that serve all of us, many other things would be different too.

McClellan goes on to say that in order to move away from the permanent campaign mentality – where tactics used in trying to get elected are wrongly employed as a part of governance – new staff positions need to be created that separate politics from policy. In the context of the administrative structure we already have these ideas might be worth a try, but in the context of creating a governmental structure that serves the American people as best as possible, it’s hard to imagine that a “Deputy Chief of Staff for Governing” and a few new support staff are going to fix the severely broken system in place now.

In the end, McClellan is clearly just another player in a bureaucratic and political nightmare that still continues to this day, and unless his book helps us to wake up from it, I’m not sure it has much to offer now beyond satisfying some morbid curiosity about the internal workings of the Bush Administration. But as someone who was tasked with the unique role of translating the White House’s untenable positions into statements that the press could try to take back to the American people, to have McClellan admit several times that he was passing along lies and disinformation is still a big deal. In that sense, What Happened is at least one small act of penance in a Presidency that has so much to be sorry for.

Huh?

Oh yeah, universal health care was one of the things I bought on my $3 Trillion Shopping Spree. I did it at the website 3trillion.org, which asks the question: “The occupation of Iraq will cost $3 trillion…can YOU spend that money better?” It’s an interesting exercise, and a great way to put the costs of the U.S. presence in Iraq into perspective.

Here is the full list of purchases I put in my cart:

• Universal healthcare for all Americans
  Price: $920,100,000,000.00
• Apple, Inc.
  Price: $24,000,000,000.00
• Microsoft Corp.
  Price: $262,260,000,000.00
• Google
  Price: $2,499,750,000.00
• Become President of the U.S.
  Price: $1,000,000,000.00
• No Kill Animal Shelters World Wide
  Price: $7,000,000,000.00
• Sustainable Agriculture Education, Worldwide
  Price: $200,000,000.00
• End our Dependence on Foreign Oil
  Price: $500,000,000,000.00
• 1000 Teachers’ Salaries
  Price: $39,274,000.00
• Build a National High-Speed Rail System
  Price: $300,000,000,000.00
• The Office: Season 1
  Price: $11.00

Gosh, and I still have a $1 Trillion left over, but I got a little depressed and had to stop. Spending $3 Trillion is hard! Unless you’re a certain global superpower.

What would you buy?

No End In Sight is pitched as an insider’s tale of the reckless decision-making and subsequent incompetence that has propelled the invasion and occupation of Iraq forward from the planning stages to the present day, and it satisfies that characterization quite well. I was impressed with the broad scope (in rank, affiliation and political persuasion alike) of the subjects that writer/director Charles Ferguson was able to secure for the film – everyone from former State Department leader Richard Armitage to soldiers and diplomats who had been on the ground in Iraq carrying out the haphazard instructions from afar. What’s more, they seemed unusually candid and authentic, almost humbled by the chance to reflect – saying out loud how badly things were done, clearly second guessing themselves and their decision-making process they engaged in, barely containing their frustration at the conflicts and politicking within the Bush administration that prevented any real meaningful collaboration or planning to take place. It was amazing to hear from some of the people who were ostensibly planning for life in Iraq after the invasion, and all the roadblocks and impossible tasks they encountered. It reminded me somewhat of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, with the same kinds of long, uncomfortable pauses as people who were directly responsible for life and death decisions came to grips with their place in history.

Beyond the interviews, the film is a great chronology of the invasion and occupation as a whole. With the inattentive and lopsided media coverage the many-hundred-billion dollar adventure gets, it’s all too easy to forget that it’s been going on for more than 4 years and that so many different milestones of presidential, congressional, and national identity (many of them unfortunate) have been reached along the way. But despite the moving stories of discontent from U.S. soldiers and the wrangling of egos and power agendas in the U.S., this is about huge losses of life, total destruction of communities, cities, cultures, livelihoods, and a profound sense of injustice, all sustained by the Iraqi people at the hands of our country’s military/industrial complex. The collection of footage often never shown in mainstream media for its heartbreaking implications is in itself a story of unacceptable disconnection from this tragedy.

One of the soldiers interviewed for the film, Field Artillery Gunner Hugo Gonzales, talked about how his life now was preoccupied by trying to find some meaning in the occupation there, especially given his debilitating injuries and near-constant pain. I felt such sadness for him and his fellow soldiers, knowing they have in most cases done what they believe is right and necessary, and that some of them are now feeling pangs of doubt (if not plain outrage) about the nature and origins of their mission. As I walked out of No End in Sight, it was clear to me that any universally useful meaning will probably only come years from now, when the machinations of national and cultural self-consciousness will finally lead to some wider-spread sense that the whole ordeal was a catastrophic mistake. But until then, the movie gives us as much perspective as might be possible while the battles continue and more lives are needlessly lost.

While President George W. Bush would not be interviewed for the movie, other interviewers have asked him and his advisers about the logic and decision-making process that governed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and most often the response is to brush off the mistakes of the past, saying that dwelling on them doesn’t really serve a useful purpose, and to talk about what needs to happen to move forward (hey, that sounds familiar!). While I understand this perspective, I think it is horribly flawed.

And so I really appreciate that in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore took the time to look deeply at the thought processes, public and private conversations, and general approach to decision making that has dominated the Bush administration’s tenure, not the least outcome of which was the mess in Iraq. Gore starts with the psychology of fear and takes us on a whirlwind tour of how it is used to subvert our appreciation of reason, even to the point where the decisions we make are not in our own self-interest. He looks at the language and framing used by modern politicians (certainly with a critical focus pointed right at conservatives) and how every pressing issue of the day — from climate change to foreign policy to immigration to Katrina to the economy — are being poorly addressed or not addressed at all because of the paralysis of the nation due to these tactics. The sad part of his thesis is that, for those who are assaulting reason, it’s all about power:

Throughout history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all too frequently with some malignant dogma, masquerading as a message from God, to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression in the repertoire of hell. Moreover, this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power. –p. 48

Like some interviewees in No End In Sight, Gore effectively lambastes the Bush administration for its approach to Iraq, but does so in the context of the notion that the Iraq invasion was a distraction from the search for Osama bin Laden and those who attacked the U.S. on 9-11. He returns to the amazing phenomenon where some high percentage of U.S. citizens surveyed incorrectly believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with those attacks, and the rhetoric and carefully planned talking points of the neocon planners that facilitated that trend. In other words, because of the way reason has been assaulted and the truth twisted, lots of people died.

Gore is optimistic about possibilities for improvement and solutions to the phenomenon he lays out, but I’m not sure I can agree with the specific paths he sees to resolution. His primary conclusion is that if Americans can reclaim the practice of meaningful public debate about the issues that face us, we can once again be a nation governed by reason and true democracy. Specifically, Gore sees the promise of the Internet as the key vehicle to that reclaiming, and goes on to promote some of his own efforts with Current TV to that effect.

…the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. –p. 260

It sounds really good, but as George Lakoff and others have identified, pinning our hopes for the resurrection of a nation driven by progressive values on the notion that everyone just needs to be more reasonable is NOT a strategy for success. The reality is that people will let their understanding of the world and their short-term preferences override any deep comprehension of what might be reasonable or right; even, as I mentioned above, when they are making decisions that conflict with their own self-interest. I’ve experienced that often here in my home town, where some of my attempts to engage those with opposing viewpoints using the tools of logic and reason results only in further misunderstanding, animosity, and even outright resentment at the attempt. I’ve come to understand this as something I can’t really completely blame on the people I’m engaging – if I can’t interact with them in a way that is meaningful and useful to both of us, then that’s partly my fault, too.

Still, Gore’s clarity of vision is worth hearing out, even if it isn’t a comprehensive one. As with soldier Gonzales` attempt to find meaning in the events of the past four years, Gore does manage to make a lot of sense of how we got where we are in a fear-based national identity, and I consider The Assault on Reason to be an essential contribution to the discussion about what we want for ourselves from here on out.