At State, the News Needs No Muse

By Al Kamen
Friday, December 8, 2006

The Iraq Study Group report rocketed through town Wednesday, setting thousands of reporters off in search of foreign policy experts to opine about what it all meant.

Some agencies tried to make sure none of their people was caught talking out of school about the report, which, as White House spokesman Tony Snow gamely spun, was not in any way a "rebuke" of President Bush's policies.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice laid down the rules early Wednesday. An e-mail "Watch Alert" from the department's operations center went out at 11:07 a.m., announcing that the report "has been released and is now available" at various Web sites.

Within minutes, all the folks in Assistant Secretary John C. Rood's Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation got this e-mail:

All -- Strict guidance this a.m. from the Secretary that she does not want any public "musing" by State officers on the Iraq Study Group report. All public comments will be handled by PA[Public Affairs].

So be sure to keep your "musing" private -- or at least on background.

There's No Mess, but Clean It Up Anyway

Meanwhile, over at "PA," they were focusing like laser beams on the most important parts of the Iraq report, summarized by this topic headline in yesterday's press briefing: "Iraq Study Group Report is Not a Criticism of Rice's Efforts."

Study Group member Vernon Jordan couldn't agree more: "We don't look at how the house got put on fire," he told The Washington Post when asked about the report. "This is about how do we go forward from there" -- and put it out.

Gates: Gone Missing

How quickly they forget. A reporter asked a study group aide if incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a study group member until he was nominated in early November, had been sent a copy of the report.

"No," the aide said. "We didn't know how to reach him anymore."

Billionaires for Blue Dogs?

All the political oddsmakers are looking to see which political candidates will generate that all- important "bandwagon effect," so the money, staff and endorsements will flood in and assure the candidate's nomination.

The same effect might apply to organizations. So we find that on Nov. 8, the day after the midterm elections, multibillionaire Bill Gates dropped $1,000 on the Blue Dog Political Action Committee. Sure, Microsoft's PAC has been a regular donor, but the chairman himself does not appear to have given before from his own wallet to that group of moderate and conservative House Democrats.

Time to jump on?

Holiday Cheer and Rumsfeld Don't Mix

So everyone in the Joint Chiefs' directorates (J-1 to J-8) at the Pentagon was planning on holding Christmas parties on Friday, Dec. 15 -- the most obvious day since, after that, folks might start drifting out of town. But buzz is that someone, apparently in the office of the chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, had fretted that it might look as if all the hootin' and hollerin' that would be spilling out into the hallways was in celebration of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's departure that same day. (Leaving on that day, by the way, Rumsfeld will apparently fail to realize his dream of surpassing Robert McNamara's length-of-service record as secretary.)

So word came down last week to change the dates of the Christmas parties. Done.

Opening the Door Wider for Iraqis

Meanwhile, the State Department has approached the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office to see about having more Iraqi refugees screened for admission to this country. Back in the '90s, when Saddam was in charge and oppressing and killing people, Washington admitted as many 4,980 Iraqi refugees a year.

Since the U.S. invasion, however, the numbers have plummeted to 298 in 2003, 66 in 2004, and about 200 in each of the past two years.

But with as many as 2 million Iraqis having fled the chaos and sectarian violence since the invasion -- and an estimated 100,000 a month coming out these days -- the United States is talking to the United Nations about boosting its intake. The focus, we're told, appears to be on helping Chaldean Christians, who are getting pounded by everyone over there. There's a U.S. ceiling of 5,500 refugees for this fiscal year for all the Middle East, plus a few thousand more "unallocated" slots that might be used.

One major problem is that the United Nations is grossly underfunded and understaffed, the refugee folks say, so they don't have enough people to process the huge numbers of Iraqis.

Still, it shouldn't be hard to boost the numbers just a little. Eight were resettled in October and nine in November. Well, that's an upward trend.