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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (15697)	11/9/2003 7:26:14 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793630

Here is a commentary where the word, optimism, is used for the other side. Part 1. By Nicholas D. Kristof Don't sentence U.S. to death by optimism On a visit to Saddam's Iraq a year ago, I wrote a column that outraged his government. It described officials burning a Muslim leader's beard and then driving nails through his head. The next day I was summoned to a government ministry and menacingly denounced by two of Saddam's henchmen. But neither man could speak English, and they hadn't actually read the offending column. (Imagine officials who don't read papers but rely on underlings for briefings!) At that point, my government minder took my column and translated it for them. I saw my life flash before my eyes. But my minder's job was to spy on me, and he worried that my tough column would reflect badly on his spying. Plus, he was charging me $100 a day, and he would lose a fortune if I was expelled, or worse. So he translated my column very selectively. There was no mention of burning beards or nails in heads. He left out whole paragraphs. When he finished, the two senior officials shrugged and let me off scot-free. That episode underscored to me how difficult it was for Saddam's government to get accurate information. Ultimately, Saddam's rule collapsed in part because he couldn't read Iraq and made decisions based on hubris and bad information. These days, President Bush and his aides are having the same problem. Critics complain that they lied to the American public about how difficult the war would be, but I fear the critics are wrong: They didn't just fool us - they also fooled themselves. Evidence suggests that Bush and Dick Cheney may have actually believed that our troops would be, as Cheney predicted, "greeted as liberators." The administration chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking, and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan. I wish administration officials were lying, because I would prefer hypocrisy to delusion - at least hypocritical officials make decisions with accurate information. Policy by wishful thinking is crippling our occupation. Initially, U.S. officials didn't restrain looting because they regarded it as celebratory high jinks. Then, confident that security was in hand, they disbanded the Iraqi army. They didn't push hard to bring in international forces. The foreign forces they suggest introducing were the Turks, which adds to my fear that administration officials have been more deluded than duplicitous.