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16 Dec 2008 08:29 am

Fragments

Packer reads the Senate report and a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction:

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.

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