Fruit Salad: Lumps or Splits? Posted by Michael Signer

I was over at the Senate today and ended up talking with someone who works on a related committee about the Iraq Study Group, and he agreed with my assessment that the tug of war right now over the developing assessment of the Report -- not to mention its legacy -- reminds one of the 9/11 Commission.  As they say, there are lumpers and there are splitters. 

James Baker framed the stakes this way: 

"I hope we don't treat this as a fruit salad, and say, 'I like this but I don't like that."

It does really depend on how you like your fruit salad, I guess.

Lumpers are going to view each of the Report's 79 recommendations as elements of an integral whole, thereby imputing to the Study Group itself a kind of general, statesmanlike wisdom. 

This process would, for President Bush, have the general import of placing the burden on a sort of collective eminence grise -- like a special master in a courtroom.  The process of lumping would also, however, create a distracting glory -- placing another entity aside and beyond the President.  And I fear in his total commitment to the unitary executive theory and to his own quasi-messianism, he's going to concentrate on this possibility as a peril, rather than a promise.  Ironically, he will damage his own legacy the most by refusing to deal with those who offer him a way out.

Splitters -- including the President and Vice President Cheney -- will parse the report and pick and choose which recommendations fit a pre-formed ruling paradigm.  They will not, in other words, accept that the Study Group has delivered a new framework that generates each of the 79 proposals.

This is wrong, because the Report does have a new paradigm.  It invites a general paradigm shift toward negotiation and away from demand; toward goals and accountability rather than rhetoric and manipulated figures of success; and toward long-term planning rather than short-term political victories.  Taken together, these represent a healthy and eminently more reasonable approach.  And it's the approach -- the paradigm -- that is the issue.  Switching metaphors entirely, it's the horse, stupid.  Carts, we can figure out.

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