Unqualified Offerings

according to a comment downblog from the other day. Robin Wright explains just what “in sight” means, using three official State Department trips to the Iraq as a microcosm of the worsening security situation. The broad outline is that on each successive trip government movements around Baghdad were more constricted and more furtive. But beyond the broad outline, it’s the details that really bring the change home:

The press corps, including veteran war correspondents, was sequestered in Hussein’s old palace for most of the seven-hour stay. We were discouraged from wandering the palace and were provided escorts to go to the bathroom.

Well, wow. So we apply basic Hayekian principles to foreign policy for about the millionth time on this blog: the inability of US officials to travel freely about the capital, let alone the country at large, and to interact with Iraqis in contexts that are not fraught with military tension means that US officials are operating with a massive information shortage. It’s common for the jingoshere to say we’re not getting the true story of Iraq because US-born reporters are too scared to leave their hotels. More darkly, the hawks mutter that the Emm Ess Emm^TM therefore relies on Iraqi stringers of dubious loyalty.

But the American government is in the same situation, trapped in enclaves and reliant on the reports of one or another self-interested Iraqi party, chiefly politicians or businessmen whose first loyalty is to their own position. The US military gets around more physically, but an exchange between people in body armor with guns and people looking down those guns’ barrels forecloses all kinds of understandings that would be useful for both parties.

So we’ll continue to thrash blindly about, very possibly too big a prey to bring down, but sightless and maddened by a thousand (or two thousand) stings, landing now on an enemy, now on a friend, and now on someone who should have been a friend. As to the mass of Iraqi subjects and leaders, they will route around us where possible and gain as much advantage as they can elsewise.