No rain on this parade. I'll make the obvious point, that yesterday's quickie, furtive "sovereignty" handover in Iraq represents a shocking admission of weakness on the part of the Bush Administration, which would never have let itself be cheated out of its long-prepared media extravaganza (Dan Rather was in the Green Zone, for God's sake, all ready to strap into his flak jacket!) had there been the least prayer of the event going off without major (and untelegenic) insurgent violence.

You'll look in vain to find that obvious point in the reams of feature and analysis with which the Times lards the transfer-of-power event today. Caught flatfooted, like all the morning dailies, by the thief-in-the-night timing, the Times is doing its best to proceed as if the Historical Moment had, indeed, fully expressed its historicalness with all due pomp and ceremony. Of course, some adjustments will have to be made: but the Times loves nothing so much as a parade of official fictions, and it's assembled a crack team of official fiction-mongers to make sure all the floats are lined up and the marching bands in place.

Frankly, I don't have the spirit to go too deep into the paper's coverage of the handover; this is by a decent margin the most dishearteningly obtuse A section, as a collective performance, that I've seen from the Times since I started blogging. [A measure of just how sad things are: John F. Burns, who presided over a brief, welcome dawn of skeptical Iraq reporting through much of April, when the overall failure of the occupation regime was starting to become apparent, hasn't been seen in the pages of the Times since the first week in May. He surfaces today, at last, with a fawning, take-everything-he-says-at-face-value, full-page profile of Jerry Bremer (the gag-me headline: "Looking Beyond His Critics, Bremer Sees Reason for Both Hope and Caution") that'd be risible if it didn't read like some sort of awful Stalinist public penance. Out of respect for Burns, I'll forbear detailing the piece's multiple failures of nerve.] Much of it in fact (David Sanger's so-called "analysis," firmly making its stand in Heroic Bush Gamble territory, Steven R. Weisman gassing on about the mysteries of sovereignty, which he's no closer to solving than he was a month ago) looks pre-written, and proceeds apparently unperturbed by the scheduling hiccup. It's left to Eric Schmitt, in an inner-page account, to fully assimilate the inconvenient fact of the sovereignty surprise party to the grand rhetoric of Decision:

More than a week ago, a handful of top Bush administration officials and their Iraqi allies in Baghdad began seriously mulling a once far-fetched idea: Why wait until June 30 to transfer sovereignty to the new interim Iraqi government?

By Monday morning, their secret plan had become a stunning reality as NATO leaders meeting here, as well as the rest of the world, learned that a transition to formal sovereignty scheduled for Wednesday had happened 48 hours early. American officials said the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, made the final decision late Sunday, with President Bush's blessing.

The story of how a transfer that critics once said could never be done by June 30 was accomplished even earlier offers a peek into the administration's secretive decision making and its desire to bolster a crucial ally and keep a ruthless insurgency off balance.

"Insurgency and Able Government Prompted Transfer Decision"

Did Schmitt come up with this himself, having drunk the Bush Kool-aid, or is he just synthesizing the no doubt hurriedly cobbled-together Administration spin? I guess there's no real practical difference between those alternatives, though, and either way it's a technically impressive propaganda exercise. I'm especially fond of that brave "handful" of planners, "seriously mulling" that crackpot, "once far-fetched idea." Can't you just see it? All of them around the table, going late into the night, shirtsleeves rolled up, cigar smoke choking the lamps, and then the eureka moment: You know, Iyad—that plan's so crazy it just might work! In Schmitt's extraordinary up-is-down telling (Sanger has a version of this, too), the suddenness of the transfer isn't a concession to weakness and lack of initiative: it's an audacious move (secret and stunning) to set the enemy (and an amazed world) reeling! By God, the critics said it couldn't be done—but we showed 'em, didn't we, boys?

Not sure exactly what movie Schmitt has playing in his head—but it's obviously a lot better than the awkward reality. A positively Reaganesque performance, Eric.

posted by michael  5:48:17 PM  
tell me about it []