Condi's conundrum

There's no political humor quite like unintentional political humor. And America's First Spinster has provided plenty. Her latest:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Baghdad's Green Zone on Sunday on a surprise visit to Iraq where she said she saw improved security and political grouping in the centre which should attract Arab support and blunt Iran's influence.

If security is so much better, why was it a surprise visit? Why didn't she strut around Baghdad like the president of Iran did in early March? And just where was evidence of all that so-called improved security? Nicholas Kristof suggests why Condi saw what she thinks she saw -- it's all a matter of keeping those blinders on, blinders we're all guilty of using while denying it. They filter out impressions that clash with our biases, and allow in whatever seems to confirm them:

...consider the Dartmouth-Princeton football game in 1951. That bitterly fought contest was the subject of a landmark study about how our biases shape our understanding of reality.

Psychologists showed a film clip of the football game to groups of students at each college and asked them to act as unbiased referees and note every instance of cheating. The results were striking. Each group, watching the same clip, was convinced that the other side had cheated worse - and this was not deliberate bias or just for show.

"Their eyes were taking in the same game, but their brains seemed to be processing the events in two distinct ways," Farhad Manjoo writes in his terrific new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. It's the best political book so far this year.

So what's the reality? Are there undeniable facts Condi and other war supporters fail to acknowledge? For example, maybe it was noises she didn't want to hear:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, assured visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he will not back down in his confrontation with Shiite militias, even as mortar shells fired from Shiite areas struck the U.S.-protected Green Zone.

Maybe she thought the noise was construction work on the "Grand Square of the Liberator George W. Bush" that grateful Iraqis were working on, as predicted by the ever-prescient Richard Perle:

And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.
Richard Perle, September 22, 2003

Or maybe not.

But what a hoot to see Condi take a jab at al-Sadr, even to the point of goading him to make good on his threat to break his truce. It reminds me of Bush's reckless taunt to the then-incipient insurgency to "bring it on" if they wanted to attack US troops. They brought it, all right. But Condi's dig at this dangerous and unpredictable man simply hits a new level of official stupidity:

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he's in Iran."

Yeah, Condi. Whatever. Unlike our Great Liberator, who's up at the front daily with the men he sends into a no-win war: