Shaken, but apparently not stirred.
Yesterday in a Q & A with editors from Detroit area newspapers President Bush said he was “shaken” by reports of abuse of prisoners in US military custody in Iraq. Yet, according to his press secretary this morning, he hasn’t even looked at the Taguba Report, the one people around the world are buzzing about in disappointment and outrage and half of Washington seems already to be reading.
In fact, in this exchange from that Q & A yesterday it wasn’t even clear the president knew what the report was …
Q: Are you concerned that there was a report completed in February that apparently —
THE PRESIDENT: I haven’t seen —
Q: — Myers didn’t know about yesterday —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, if Myers didn’t know about it, I didn’t know about it. In other words, he’s part of the chain — actually, he’s not in the chain of command, but he’s a high ranking official. We’ll find out.
Q: The question is, should something causing —
THE PRESIDENT: I just need to know —
Q: — concern, raised eyebrows —
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. I think you’ll find the investigation started quickly when they found out what was going on. What I need to know is what the investigators concluded.
From this exchange, the president <$Ad$>seemed unaware of what the report even was and claimed to believe that he somehow couldn’t get a hold of it until it came up through the chain of command.
The point here isn’t that the president is stupid, but that he seems blithely indifferent to what is a huge setback to American goals and standing in the Middle East and indeed throughout the world.
There’s an echo here of his response to the pre-9/11 warnings streaming up through the government bureaucracy. It hasn’t landed on his desk yet, with an action plan, so what is he supposed to do? He talked to Rumsfeld who says he’s on top of it. So what more can be done?
This isn’t a matter of the aesthetics of leadership. It is another example of how this president is a passive commander-in-chief, how he demands no accountability and, because of that, allows problems to fester and grow. Though this may not be a direct example of it, he also creates a climate tolerant of rule-breaking that seeps down into the ranks of his subordinates, mixing with and reinforcing those other shortcomings.
The disasters now facing the country in Iraq — some in slow motion, others by quick violence — aren’t just happening on the president’s watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him — because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.
