Last night on Bill Moyers I saw an interview with Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky of the world famous in Poland Institute of Expertology.
They were on Moyers to discuss their brilliant new work of satire: Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak, a compendium of quotes abridged with the occasional established facts about the expert prognostication we've been lucky to have endured during the run-up to and the duration of the War in Iraq.
The book opens with this quote:
You need someone in office who will tell the truth.
George W. Bush, Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency
October 17, 2000.
Experts agree: this is an essential quality of distinguished leadership. Even in Poland.
The team of experts at the institute have compiled a stunning and expertly sourced list of expert opinions expertly edited, footnoted and presented in a warm and fuzzy catalogue. Some of my favorite sections include:
- Unimpeachable Sources: the World According to Judith Miller
- Inspecting the Inspectors (or the Search for Rosie O'Donell's Stretch Marks)
- How long will it last? (or When Do We Get to Dine in the Gaslight District?)
- "The Greatest Heroine of All Time": Saving Private Lynch
- and of course the epilogue discussed in the Moyers Interview.
As you all know Thomas Friedman, one of America's most illustrious experts on foreign policy and topology alike, is still employed at the New York Times. As amazing as that sounds it is this Thomas Freidman that has gifted the world with what has become known to regular people and experts in the field of modern physics as the Freidman Unit or the F.U. According to ANSI the FU is equal to about six months on the planet earth; elsewhere in the galaxy the FU can vary, but 1 FU is still considered about 6 months and should be such for the purposes of reading this diary. So the authors spin their yarn and tell the story of American expert hegemony on Iraq while at regular intervals conspicuously inserting quotes from said luminaries throughout the length of their tome. I'd like to recommend the book and share some of these expert FUs with you in this diary.
The next six months in Iraq - which will determine the prospects for Democarcy-building there - are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
November 20, 2003
I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical.
Senator John McCain
September 10, 2003
The important thing is to realize that we are about to enter into a very critical six months.
Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain
January 4, 2004
[In terms of the timeline for the presence of multi-national forces,] I think it will be a question of months rather than years. The important thing is to realize that we are about to enter into a very critical six months.
Ali Allawi, Defense Minister for Iraq
May 25, 2004
It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what's the rush? Can we let this play out, please?
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
June 3, 2004
What we're gonna find out ... in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
October 3, 2004
Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
November 28, 2004
I think the next nine months are critical.
Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to the UN
June 29, 2005
I think the next 18 months are crucial.
Retired General Barry R. McCaffrey
July 18, 2005
The developments over the next several months will be critical - as General Casey and General Abizaid and the secretary made very clear over the course of last week.
General David Petraeus
October 5, 2005
We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year.
Senator John McCain
December 4, 2005
We're at the beginning of I think the decisive I would say six months in Iraq.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
December 20, 2005
I think we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
January 23, 2006
The next six months in Iraq are going to be critical.
Ashra Qazi, UN Secretary General's Special Representative for Iraq
March 15, 2006
Well I think we're going to find out ... In the next year to six months - probably sooner - whether a decent outcome is possible there.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
May 11, 2006
From the inexorable optimists at Strategic Forecasting, Inc:
We would say the next six weeks, rather than months, will show us where things are.
Strategic Forecasting, Inc.
May 22, 2006
I know it's the cliche of the war. But we'll know in the next six months - and this time, it'll be the last next six months we get.
Army Counterinsurgency Specialist
June 1, 2006
The FUs continued to roll off the tongues of experts and fly through time and space, through the tubes, over the internets, the cable and satellite TV boxes and the regular old doorsteps of America in the run-up to the mid-term elections in November 2006 when Americans went to the polls and basically threw the bums out. It seems that among the experts the only casualty of the election was Donald Rumsfeld who did not know before the vote that he would be fired summarily by George Bush for failing to execute Rumsfeld's own failed "light footprint" strategy in Iraq. How could Rumsfeld know the unknowable? Experts agree: he could not.
Six months after Joe Klein published this last quote for Time in an article titled: Why Bush Is (Still) Winning the War at Home. George W. Bush announced to the nation that the surge would bring the control and stability to Iraq that our nearly four year war had so far failed to provide. The surge would allow Iraqis to stand up and our soldiers stand down, returning them all home to their lives and their central mission to protect and defend the Constitution of this nation from all enemies foreign and domestic, experts included.
On Wednesday January 10, 2007 John McCain appeared on a pre-game countdown to the surge show broadcast on MSNBC with Tim Russert the day of Bush's surge speech in January 2007. This is a large portion of that segment:
John McCain: There Goes the Heartland (6:05)
Now that Rumsfeld was out and Condi was still in the administration would turn to the clear, hold and build strategy that experts agree is the "Classic Counter Insurgency Methodology that has worked [so well] in the past."
McCain: Those that want to withdraw in the next 4 to 6 months have an obligation to tell us what's going to happen after that. I believe that we can and it's possible for us to prevail if we practice the Classic Counter Insurgency Methodology that has worked in the past: You Clear. Hold. And Build ...
Russert: How much time do you think realistically, now that we're in the fourth year of this war, do the Iraqis have to demonstrate progress?
McCain:I think it has to happen pretty soon. We haven't done the job we had hoped to do in training Iraqi military... blah blah blah ... Holding under our control, making progress, you'll see it in the upcoming months, but I can't give you an exact date on it.
And again I want to emphasis Tim, I keep hearing over and over from some of our friends who say, "We've got to have a with-draw-ahhh-al, and a nearly immediate withdrawal and that was the message of the '06 election." Joe Lieberman would never have been re-elected as a strong proponent of the war against an opponent who was for pull-out if that was the American people's attitude ...
We were greeted as liberators... Look at the films when we rolled into Baghdad... It was easy by the way...
All along it was because we did not have the Classic Counter Insurgency Strategy which is: Clear. Hold. And Build ...
We cleared and then would leave. As I've said in other hearings we were playing a game of whack-a-mole ...
Russert: And when you flipped that coin at the National College Football Championship the other night and Florida won did you say to yourself: There goes Ohio in 2008?
McCain: There goes the Heartland.
The day that segment and the surge was announced by President George Bush SUSA reported that Bush had just lost Utah in its state by state tracking poll. Utah, people.
Back to the Institute's work:
At six months we'll know and then we have to do something dramatic.
Secretary of State Condolezza Rice
January 12, 2007
We can know fairly well in a few months.
Senator John McCain
February 4, 2007
The logical thing is to wait four to six months.
Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution
February 24, 2007
Give it six more months or so, maybe nine more months.
Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution
August 5, 2007
Play this out for the next six months.
William Kristol, Editor of the The Weekly Standard
August 13, 2007
Kristol and friends settled on "Weekly Standard" to name their publication instead of their first choice "American Standard" one night in a Georgetown restaurant as they relieved themselves in the men's room and noticed the problem. Good thing the joint didn't go with Kohler.
We're kicking ass.
President George W. Bush
September 6, 2007
The next six months are going to be critical.
Senator John McCain
September 12, 2007
I'm afraid we've run out of six months.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
September 24, 2007
Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discuss Mission Accomplished on Countdown Thursday Night:
Transcript from Countdown May 1, 2008
OLBERMANN: It proves, once again, that the only thing they are even halfway good at is half-assed lying and they are really not very good at that. These are not very bright people, on top of not being very human people or very sensitive people. To that point, we now have an update on this horrible number from April, that it's 52 U.S. troops that were killed. The Defense Department has confirmed that number. It's the deadliest month since September of last year. What is it going to take to reignite that core of anger that had developed, justifiably, in this country over this god-forsaken war?
MADDOW: In addition to the update of the number of troops killed in April, we also heard today—there was a report in the San Diego Union Tribune of an Army Ranger, a young Army Ranger who was killed in Afghanistan this week, who was on his seventh tour. Seven tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that the well of anger about Iraq is always there to be tapped. But I think maybe it becomes something that can't be shushed, something that can't be excluded from the national discussion.
Can't or shouldn't?
Decorated Ranger known for conviction
A Poway High School graduate who achieved his childhood dream of being an Army Ranger died during combat in Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Sgt. 1st Class David McDowell, 30, is remembered by his family and friends as a man who followed his father into the Army and made himself an elite, decorated soldier.
"Down to the last bone in his body, the guy believed in what he did," said Jesse Carlson, 29, of Carlsbad, who went to high school with McDowell and played football with him.
McDowell had been deployed seven times in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Army Special Operations Command. His honors included two Bronze Stars with valor devices and a Purple Heart.
Sgt. McDowell leaves behind a wife, son, daughter, both his parents and two sisters.