Finally, plain speaking

FROM the start, the debate over the war in Iraq has been conducted in phrases at once fevered and self-deceiving.

If “The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward -- A New Approach” does nothing else, it has recalled our national conversation to the language of sobriety and to a syntax that elevates words whose meaning is plain. This is no small thing, for to borrow Wittengenstein’s famous aphorism: “The harmony between thought and reality is in the grammar of the language.”

Politics that abhor plain meaning end in tragedy.

Copies of the bipartisan study group’s report are available online, but it’s well worth spending the $13.95 on the nicely mounted paperback edition now in stores (142 pages from Vintage Books), because this slim volume rewards rereading and careful consideration.

The stakes are obviously high. As the 10-member group’s chairmen -- former Republican Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton -- write in the letter that introduces the report: “Because of the role and responsibility of the United States in Iraq, and the commitments our government has made, the United States has special obligations. Our country must address as best it can Iraq’s many problems. The United States has long-term relationships and interests in the Middle East, and needs to stay engaged.” To meet its obligations, Baker and Hamilton write, “Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance over rhetoric.... The President and Congress must work together. Our leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people in order to win their support.”

One of the things that enhance the study group’s report is that the authors have followed their own prescription. It begins with astringent precision: “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved.” The group points out, “Violence is increasing in scope and lethality.... The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism is pervasive.

“If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread. Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory and expand its base of operations. The global standing of the United States could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.”

There’s more in a similar vein and if it feels like hot black coffee and a cold shower after a giddy and dangerous drunk, there’s a reason for that.

The policy prescriptions the group has set already are being discussed, debated and disagreed with -- as they should and must be. The factual assessments that accompany these recommendations, however, are as soberly plain-spoken as the rest of the report and demand to be taken into account, because they have the authority of unblinking realism. For example, the assessment that builds to recommendations 77 and 78, which deal with intelligence issues, has this to say about the administration’s conduct in Iraq: “The Defense Department and the intelligence community have not invested sufficient people and resources to understand the political and military threat to American men and women in the armed forces.... We were told that there are fewer than 10 analysts on the job at the Defense Intelligence Agency who have more than two years’ worth of experience in analyzing the insurgency. Capable analysts are rotated to new assignments, and on-the-job training begins anew.”

Worse, “there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases.” According to the group, the official accounts of what transpired in Iraq on one day in July of this year recorded 93 attacks, when, in fact, 1,100 “acts of violence” occurred. Similar, attempts to conceal the actual number of casualties also were noted with the clear implication that they were overlooked because they were politically inconvenient. As the authors write, “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”

Complementary reporting

Coverage of the Iraq Study Group’s conclusions has been an extraordinary window on the way in which new and traditional media can complement each other in the public interest. The report was available online the morning of its publication and in bookstores as a so-called instant book by that afternoon. Cable television covered the study group’s full press conference live; newspaper and magazine websites had stories and analysis available within minutes. The online opinion journals were buzzing with comment within hours and the next day’s papers had not only full accounts and deeper, more reflective analysis, but reports on the reaction to the report across the spectrum of opinion.

The context in which this coverage was received was singular as well. Watching and listening to the experienced and sober representatives of both parties who made up the group describe their respect for each other and their attention to each other’s views, it was impossible not to feel a kind of collective exhalation in relief. Suddenly, it was as if the grown-ups were back. This, we were reminded by several of the group’s distinguished members, is the way the American system is supposed to work.

There was something particularly touching in listening to former Democratic congressman and Clinton Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta of Monterey and the acerbic former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan K. Simpson, engage in a dialogue on the inherent virtues of compromise and bipartisanship. Simpson was particularly moving, when he warned people who would be reading the report against the reactions of ideologues, the people he labeled “hundred-percenters.” They are, he warned, “seethers” rather than “seekers” after truth and reconciliation.

In fact, implicit in the language and analysis of the Iraq Study Group is the suggestion that the red state/blue state rigidities of our current politics have not only impeded the competent conduct of the war in Iraq, but the dark suspicion that it was this Manichean dichotomy that betrayed us into the situation at that start.

The diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien once mused that all international crises could be divided into two categories: There are problems, which have solutions, and there are situations, and they have outcomes. The authors of the Study Group’s report implicitly recognize this division and, moving beyond the hyperbolic -- and false choices -- expressed by disconnected discussions of “victory” and “defeat,” starkly note, “There is no guarantee for success in Iraq. The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire.”

It is this maturity and sobriety that has made so much of the extreme and ideological reaction to the report seem suddenly callow and beside the point. When Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid New York Post, for example, caricatures the group’s chairmen on its cover as “surrender monkeys,” it seems less offensive and sophomoric than it does beside the point -- embarrassing when compared to the study group’s seriousness.

In the end, the real significance of the Iraq Study Group’s work may be felt far more forcefully in the United States than in the Middle East. There is a palpable sense in the reaction to this distinguished panel’s style that the fevered indulgence in rigid ideological contention that has characterized our politics over these last seven years has created not simply discord, but danger.

A mature nation is a bit like a person with fear of heights. They may go right to the edge, but upon reaching it, instinctively draw back to safer ground. In its reaction to the Iraq Study Group’s somber but implacably realistic report, you can almost feel the American nation pulling back from the edge of tragic self-deception.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com