A senior Army officer in Iraq once told me that, if only Bush had explained to the public what was really going on, no euphemisms, no cheerleading, just get on T.V. regularly, maybe with a map like F.D.R. during World War II, and level with the American people, then they might not have abandoned him and the war so completely. Instead, the White House rolled out every phase of the war like a marketing campaign.

This piece in today’s Times reassures me that Obama knows the difference between campaigning and governing, and between strategic communications and deliberative democracy. I’ve expressed worry that, for all their talk of transparency, he and his team think they can bypass the press and exercise total message control after the School of Rove. But Obama’s instinct is to talk to his fellow citizens like adults (just watch his encounter with Joe the Plumber), and his pre-inaugural interviews have borne that out. Rather than simply asserting his plans with anodyne uplift and ignoring the counter-arguments, he’s explained honestly, he’s reasoned, he’s even offered to listen. This approach will serve him well in the terribly difficult months ahead.

In this way, as in so many others, Obama is about to put an end to the age of Bush. Sorry, Kristol (and by the way, Interesting Times notes that your one-year contract is up and you’re still appearing on the Op-Ed page—say it ain’t so, Rosenthal and Sulzberger).

When Bernard Madoff was defrauding investors, do you imagine he gave a thought to the refugees he was going to harm? Human Rights First, formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, has a refugee protection program that advocates on behalf of, among others, Iraqi refugees (HRF also gives free and very able legal representation to Iraqis and others, including a few people I know, in asylum cases). The refugee protection program was funded by the late Picower Foundation, at $250,000 a year. All of that money is gone. Between Picower and another now-defunct foundation, JEHT, which was also conned by Madoff, HRF is looking at a shortfall of over a million dollars this year. If you want to help this excellent organization, you can.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping prosecutors get Madoff’s bail revoked so he stops sending diamond necklaces and jeweled watches to his relatives. When his net worth is totalled up and parceled out among his victims, wouldn’t it be nice if Iraqi refugees get something more than twenty-five-dollar cufflinks and two-hundred-dollar mittens?

I know Iraqi refugees are somewhere around 87th on anyone’s agenda. I know I should be writing about Gaza or economic stimulus—another day. But today, let me call your attention away from those pressing matters to a new report, scheduled for release on Monday, by Natalie Ondiak and Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress (soon to be the Obama Administration’s Heritage or A.E.I.). It’s called “Operation Safe Haven Iraq 2009,” and it’s a detailed proposal for an airlift of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have worked with Americans there and whose lives are in danger, in perpetuum, as a result.

The report establishes the rationale for such an operation, familiar to readers of this blog (where the “Guam option” was first proposed over a year ago). It also lays out, in the careful manner of Washington think-tank papers, the steps that the new President would need to take, to wit:

This idea might not hold much appeal for President Obama, for obvious reasons: security risks, cost (CAP roughly estimates a hundred million dollars to resettle forty thousand Iraqis), bad publicity. Iraq wasn’t Obama’s war; he’ll be sorely tempted to want to put it behind him. He could easily point to the current half-measures, such as the Special Immigrant Visa program set up by Congress, and say that, with recent security improvements in Iraq, there’s no pressing need for anything more drastic.

The truth, though, is that present efforts remain sluggish and inadequate. According to CAP, only six hundred Iraqis made it here in 2008, under the Special Immigrant Visa program, which permits five thousand a year. And even a political-military miracle in Iraq won’t protect those Iraqis who identified themselves with the American project and in doing so marked themselves as traitors in the eyes of extremists. Their emergency continues. An airlift would cut through all the obstacles to ending it, all at once.

There are, as the report points out, strategic benefits to protecting our Iraqi allies. It would raise our standing in the region; it would save a remnant of liberal-minded Iraqis who might one day return to rebuild their country. But mainly, it’s the right thing to do. For that reason, the CAP proposal will be an early test of Obama’s willingness to take political risks on behalf of important principles without powerful constituencies behind them.

A footnote: Betrayed, the play that grew out of my New Yorker article on this theme, will be performed next Monday night, at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, as a fund-raiser for the very worthy organization Refugees International. And two of the Iraqis who inspired the play’s lead roles, and who appear in the article as Firas and Laith, will be arriving, after years of effort, on these shores any day now. Al-hamdulillah.

From the Dept. of Meritocracy:

Joe the Plumber to become war correspondent in Israel for conservative Web site.

Another reader, Mark Shickel of Santa Monica, takes issue with my criticism of Sean Penn’s journalism:

If the “skilled professionals” were doing their jobs properly, we wouldn’t need Mr. Penn to take time off from his acting to have a go at it. If Judy Miller, The NY Times, et al. hadn’t just acted as stenographers/propagandists for the Pentagon, maybe we wouldn’t have the Iraq debacle on our hands. If ‘Brownie’ had been doing his job at FEMA, maybe Mr. Penn wouldn’t have needed to head on down there at his own expense to help…

Recent events have only reinforced many people’s skepticism of how much truth is really being dispensed by the “skilled professionals,” and how much of it is bought and paid for propaganda. Remember how we the taxpayer were paying for phony positive stories regarding Iraq and the No Child Left Behind policy? I completely disagree that he has “a kind of contempt for journalism.” I think we need more citizen journalists like Mr. Penn, not less, people who are passionate about getting out there and discovering the truth for themselves…

Unfortunately, in a meritocracy, the actors who act badly DO get good roles, and the writers who write badly DO get good jobs at major publications, and the editors who edit poorly DO get good jobs at The Nation, and the investors who invest badly DO get access to lots of money to lose so we can bail them out, and the people who govern badly DO get good jobs as the President of the U.S.A., only to make an absolute disaster of it. That’s why it’s not called Utopia.

He’s right, of course. The great story of the past decade has been the failure of the elites and the institutions they lead—not just the media, but the military, intelligence, business, finance, and the federal government. But the answer to bad journalism isn’t more bad journalism. The cure for its failures is to insist that elites live up to their obligations. Sean Penn is no more qualified to be a foreign correspondent than Sarah Palin was to be a vice president. The idea that either of them could do the job without qualifications is a fake populism that’s a reaction to our fake meritocracy, and just as destructive. What we need is real meritocracy. I’d like to think that will be one of the positive effects of the Obama Presidency.

My derisive response to the news that Obama will have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration was greeted with even greater derision by bloggers and other readers, including one who signed off her e-mail as “Miss Terri Ford, the righteous redhead of Minneapolis, Minnesota,” after clobbering me with eloquent outrage:

George, poets everywhere are frothing at their literary mouths. Honestly! You would think that Obama just asked an Inaugural Potter to throw something onto a live kiln before the masses, or decided to have a performance artist barking in their underwear while making toast. Oh, Mr. Packer, how often I have admired you and your good sense, but this? this is too small of you. It is not worthy of you…

Poetry and Obama have plenty to say to America, and both say it well and eloquently. And the poet he selected! You don’t think that a black woman in America has something to say in her best words? You have got to be kidding me. Not only that, she is a much finer poet than many who might have been chosen (far higher calibre than Maya Angelou). And she is Obama’s friend. And why wouldn’t Obama have friends who are poets? Both value eloquence, clarity, beauty, oh, luster, even! in language, beautiful parallels (ahem, a bit of Gettysburg address, anyone?)…

What is it, really, to you, what Obama chooses for his inauguration? This is a hell of an occasion, much bigger than you, much bigger than I, and more deeply felt and significant to black people everywhere than we can truly appreciate. Extraordinary occasions DO call for extraordinary words, sir. And poetry is huge like that. Need I remind you how many people came to poetry after 9/11? Regular words are sometimes not enough. We want a language that speaks to the spirit, as we want a president who speaks to the spirit. There are times, Mr. Packer, when I’ve been in a poetry reading and it’s felt like church.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, whose blog I read regularly and admiringly, faulted me for my quick dismissal of Elizabeth Alexander’s work, and for making too much of what will be far from the dullest or most pompous moment of the ceremony.

Here’s my year-end mea culpa, so I can start 2009 with one sin fewer on my head: that post of mine was much too quick and ill-considered for the subject it took up. Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th. (But to say I was dismissing her as “a black woman in America” is unfair. I had unkind things to say about Robert Frost, too. My target was the possibility of a good inaugural poem.)

Coates, in proposing some hip-hop singers as inaugural performers, gets closer to the point I didn’t make very well. There is good poetry being written in America, and bad poetry being written. But little contemporary poetry aspires to speak to, of, and even, in some way, for the country as a whole. In America today, popular music is a likelier vehicle for such things. My post was unnecessarily caustic, but in the argument that poetry has become too marginalized in America to find language for such a historic public occasion, at least one half of my point seems obvious enough, and an obvious shame. We would all be better off if it were otherwise.

Perhaps the grand gesture is not the task of an inaugural poem; perhaps it could achieve its purpose best by aiming for something smaller than a reflection on the occasion and the age. But the poets Alexander told Dwight Garner of the Times that she’s been reading in preparation for her task—Virgil, Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks—suggest that she has certain aspirations in mind: linguistic clarity, moral intensity, historical resonance, intellectual power. If she can even approach this standard, Elizabeth Alexander will prove once again that Obama is smarter than most of his critics, including this one.

Happy new year to us all.

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. In response to the news about Obama’s inaugural, Derek Walcott, who is about the only poet I can think of who might have pulled it off, but wasn’t selected, said, “There have been great occasional poets—poets who write on occasion. Tennyson was one. I think Pope was another. Frost also.” It’s not an accident that Walcott couldn’t name a poet born after 1874. And even Frost, who was chosen by J.F.K. to read the first inaugural poem in American history, botched the job, composing a piece of triumphalist doggerel that compared Kennedy to the Roman emperor Augustus. The eighty-six-year-old Frost kept losing his place in the winter sun’s glare, the wind whipped his pages around on the podium, and finally he abandoned the effort, as if he’d never really had much conviction in it, and instead read from memory an earlier and better poem, “The Gift Outright.”

Two poets have been given the honor since Frost. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at Clinton’s first inaugural, was an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded. And I know you can’t name the poet who read at Clinton’s second inaugural (it was Miller Williams).

On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.

A forty-six-year-old professor of African-American studies at Yale named Elizabeth Alexander has been chosen to write a poem for Obama’s swearing-in. She is a friend and former neighbor of Obama’s in Chicago, and her brother worked on the campaign and the transition. These alone seem like the kind of qualifications that entitle Caroline Kennedy to a Senate seat. Judging from the work posted on her Web site, Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.

Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

The cover of the December 15th Nation magazine features an article by the veteran foreign correspondent Sean Penn on his recent trip to Venezuela and Cuba. Travelling in the company of Douglas Brinkley, the noted actor, and Christopher Hitchens, the world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist, Penn was the invited guest of President Hugo Chávez, of Venezuela, well-known as an advocate for the Social Gospel, and of Raúl Castro, Cuba’s humorous, wonky, and athletically gifted new chief executive.

During the course of his extensive interviews with Chávez and Castro, Penn displays skills as a stenographer that would come as a pleasant surprise to fans of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Many pages of Castro monologue are transcribed and transmitted to North American readers without interruption (except when “Raúl interrupts himself”), proving that Penn understands the first principle of the good interview: make the subject feel comfortable enough to open up. Good interviewers also know how to analyze the material they work so hard to elicit, and Penn treats his readers to gems such as “Inside, I’m wondering, Have I got a big story to break here? Or is this of little relevance?”

Having set Castro sufficiently at ease for the President to go on for seven hours, Penn then shows that he knows exactly when and how to pounce with the tough question. “The hour was getting late, but I didn’t want to leave without asking Castro about allegations of human-rights violations and alleged narco-trafficking facilitated by the Cuban government.” Castro predictably temporizes, but Penn is relentless, lighting upon the brilliant rebuttal that a country with just one great leader per epoch can’t be entirely democratic. “I consider mentioning this, and perhaps should have, but I’ve got something else on my mind.” Dextrously shifting gears, Penn suddenly asks, “Can we talk about drugs?”—a subtle ploy to get Castro to deliver another uninterrupted discourse on the wrongs of the United States.

Hitchens and Brinkley were not allowed to join the interview with Castro—which only shows the high regard in which Penn’s reporting talents are held by leaders around the world.

I saw “Milk” the other night and thought: this man is the greatest actor of his generation. When Penn plays Harvey Milk, he’s a sweet, whimsical gay-rights politician. When he plays Matthew Poncelet in “Dead Man Walking,” he’s a murderer on death row. No one else working today inhabits his roles as completely as Penn, and I hope one day to see him portraying a foreign correspondent. He’s such an accomplished actor that I’m absolutely certain he’ll do a more convincing job on screen than in his actual journalistic efforts.

Why does someone like Penn think he can do this job, which isn’t his job? Perhaps because he can write down and relay the words of famous people to whom his own fame gives him access, and because certain thoughts pass through his mind while he’s writing them down. Penn’s moonlighting shows a kind of contempt for journalism, which turns out to be rather difficult to do well. It also shows that he’s missed one of the main points of Obama’s election, which has Penn shedding tears at the end of his dispatch. Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy. In a meritocracy, actors who act well get good roles. They don’t get to be journalists, too—a job that, in a meritocracy, should go to those who do journalism well. Nor should any journalist, however accomplished, expect to land a leading part in Penn’s next movie.

Nor should anyone expect to be appointed U.S. senator on the grounds of being the daughter of a revered President. We have at least learned that the offspring of Presidents don’t necessarily make good politicians themselves. Politics demands certain skills honed by experience, just as journalism does, just as acting does. I’ll make a deal with Sean Penn and Caroline Kennedy: you two stick to what you do well, and I’ll stay off the big screen and withdraw from consideration by Governor Paterson.

In the past few days, two official documents on Iraq and the war on terror have come out: a bipartisan inquiry by the Senate Armed Services committee into treatment of detainees, and a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Reading through the executive summary of the first and highlights of the second gave me a distinct feeling of nausea—a sense of being dragged back down into an extremely unpleasant experience in which I’d been immersed for years and that I’d only recently started to leave behind.

No chance. A few sentences into each document and it was real and vivid all over again: the official lies and deceptions buried under acronyms and jargon; the headlong folly of arrogant policymakers; the fateful decisions made in the shadows or on the fly, and the years of terrible consequences.

These two documents bring very old news; there’s nothing remarkable about their main conclusions. The nausea I felt came from having seen and heard almost all of it before. The Senate inquiry finds that the humiliation and cruelty inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib followed from directives that originated in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Inspector General’s report (which, at 513 pages, contains far more revealing detail than the declassified version of the Senate inquiry) establishes that the U.S. government was completely unprepared for the reconstruction of Iraq, owing to the almost criminal negligence of those responsible, and that the years since the invasion have been marked by bureaucratic confusion and incompetent execution, with private contractors playing a large role in the disaster. In both narratives, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld are the prime culprits, heading a large cast of failed officials, along with a few quiet dissidents. Both documents show, without quite saying so, that years of official statements amount to a long string of lies. These documents are, among other things, a vindication of American journalism, which was years ahead of the official story—something to be noted as newspapers come crashing down all around the country.

Is it worth having these belated official imprimaturs of what anyone paying attention has known for years? I think so. They will make it all the harder for officials who have written or plan to write self-justifying memoirs (such as this, this, this, this, and this) to claim that the tragedies of the past decade were someone else’s fault. They will also make it harder for partisan hacks to rewrite the story for political advantage. In the future, anyone demanding to know who lost Iraq or who’s to blame for the next acts of global jihad should be forced to explain these dispassionate findings from bipartisan or nonpartisan sources (the Senate inquiry marks the beginning of John McCain’s campaign for rehabilitation).

The trouble is, the information in these reports doesn’t tell the whole story, and it doesn’t tell it as a complete story. The reports only give us fragments, which will be too easily overlooked or forgotten. The official sanction of torture and the woeful management of occupied Iraq are related pieces of a much larger epic: the first is marked by criminality, the second by bureaucratic ineptitude, but they are joined together as expressions and outcomes of the ideas and habits of mind of the highest officials in the Bush Administration. Eventually the country will need, even if it won’t entirely want, the whole story to be told. The best way to tell it would be to reproduce the 9/11 Commission—to convene a single bipartisan panel, with the authority to look into the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the war on terror, and give the panel full investigative power, even if its conclusions put some of the principals in legal jeopardy.

The next Administration and the next Congress will have to decide whether it’s worth the agony to look back. The agony will be worse, sooner or later, if we don’t.

In the summer of 2004, Kirkuk was the last city in Iraq outside Kurdistan where foreigners could walk the streets or eat in restaurants with only moderate risk. I went there three times and loved the place for its ancient, half-ruined streets, its variety of faces and languages, its relative tolerance and tenacity—Kirkuk is the Chicago of Iraq. But because of its terrible history under Saddam, its oil fields, and the competing claims of its three major ethnic groups, Kirkuk also seemed destined to be the fuse that would detonate an Iraqi civil war (I told the city’s story in this 2004 piece).

I was wrong: when the civil war came, in 2005 and 2006, it was an intra-Arab affair, between Shia and Sunni. By then, Kirkuk had become a very violent place, with an active Al Qaeda presence, but not on the scale I and others had imagined. Iraq’s other civil war, the one between Arabs and Kurds, remains a low-grade fight along the fault lines where the two communities meet, from Mosul in the northwest through the heartland of Kirkuk down into Diyala province along the Iranian border. And the main reason that this fight hasn’t metastasized is that the central question of Kirkuk’s future status—whether it will remain part of Iraq or join Kurdistan—keeps being put off. The scheduled referendum is postponed from year to year. Politicians and diplomats in Baghdad don’t want another apocalypse on their hands. But the question can’t be deferred indefinitely.

That a suicide bomber killed nearly fifty people in a restaurant north of Kirkuk where Arab and Kurdish leaders were meeting to discuss their differences does not come as a surprise. It was an obvious target for anyone who wants to destroy any chance of a peaceful answer to the question of Kirkuk’s future. All the better that many of the victims were women and children: it will outrage both communities and set them further against each other.

In my visits to Kirkuk I met a number of people of every ethnic and religious group who were sane—who considered themselves Kirkukis before any sectarian identity, and who hadn’t stopped talking to their counterparts in other groups, whatever their old and fresh resentments. These people were weaker than the demagogues and hard-liners, but they weren’t negligible or irrelevant; their idea of the city was a powerful one and it had an undeniable logic. After all, even Saddam had failed to complete his ethnic cleansing of Kirkuk. Why would anyone else be able to succeed? And who would want to try again?

Because it was relatively safe to meet in public, I did a lot of my talking with these Kirkukis over enormous lunches in restaurants, where I was inevitably treated. As the rest of Iraq became closed off to foreigners, I savored these sessions amid the chaos of waiters and dishes. In restaurants, a certain civic trust is an implicit part of the entry fee. You meet in a restaurant because you accept the existence and presence of others sharing the same public space, many of them strangers to you. This recognition seemed to underlie yesterday’s holiday feast at the restaurant called Abdullah. As such, it was a cruelly appropriate target of the terrorists.

It will be harder for the question of Kirkuk to be answered peacefully once the Americans have left. We’ve always been the buffer there; we only became the buffer everywhere else later on. So Kirkuk might be an early test of Obama’s withdrawal strategy and his vague promise to intervene if genocide should follow in the wake of our departure. It’s hard to be hopeful about Kirkuk, especially today. I’ve lost touch with the people I knew there; I don’t know whether their idea of the city still exists, or whether it can survive what happened at a restaurant yesterday.