Reality and virtual reality in Washington

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

It’s no secret Washington is a company town. Like one of those little Southern textile villages I knew as a child in the 1930s, everyone works for the factory and the talk of the town is the talk of the company.

One of many frustrations living in this increasingly bloated megapolis is to try to discuss “issues” seriously. Issues almost immediately become embroiled in Inside the Beltway logarithms. Defined as who is doing what to whom in the bureaucratic struggles and the constant turf warfare our Founding Fathers set up among the three government branches [granted, rightly, to protect our liberties].

But just as virtual reality can and does impact reality increasingly in our daily lives, one has to quickly admit this bureaucratic guerrilla may well determine the outcome of the greater issues.

Have I lost you?

Case in point: a former government official, a diplomat, is sent to find out if a notorious dictator has been trying to buy raw uranium from an African country to make weapons of mass destruction. He gets the job because his wife, considered an expert in the subject in the intelligence community, pushes him. Apparently she thinks he, as a former member of the U.S. diplomatic corps assigned to that country, could find out. Over many cups of mint tea, he tells us later, he is reassured the dictator isn’t doing what he tried to do earlier. Our ex-diplomat goes public with the information, apparently as part of his [and his wife’s?] opposition to the Bush Administration policies toward resolving the issue of the big, bad dictator and his possible threat to American security with weapons of mass destruction.

Whether he should have gone in the first place, whether it might not have been better for the intelligence community to try to “rent” one of the officials in nearly a dozen firms actually engaged in producing uranium in that country, rather than depend on answers from well-advertised corrupt officials, whether as a former diplomat our hero should have kissed and told, is all quickly subsumed in the virtual reality of media games of “gotcha” and the growing politicians’ culture of permanent electioneering.

Then in an effort to disentangle the mess, if there were indeed a real mess or only a virtual mess, a prosecutor looks for who was the responsible party in what might or might not have been the outing of a clandestine intelligence wife-agent. And our valiant prosecutor ends up with an indictment for a criminal offense – granted one at the heart of our judicial system – having nothing to do with a law enacted to close the door on a rogue intelligence agent who had, indeed, ”outed” agents more than a decade ago.[In truth, probably well known to their competitors in any case.]. [A sick joke aside: we always used to say you knew who the local secret intelligence station chief was because he collected paintings, had all the books published by Praeger, and a wife named Olga.]

But having had my fun and games with the not so atypical Washington scandal, the fact is the contest between reality and virtual reality is a worrying problem.

Back in the Clinton Administrations, for example, the strategic geniuses at the State Dept. bought a new concept to our relations in South Asia. India and Pakistan had fought three and a half wars Their relationship with the U.S. would no longer be considered by Washington policymakers as a zero sum game. Washington would, the virtual reality advocates said, now treat each nation independently when formulating American policy. That piece of strategic virtual reality would pass whole-hog [pardon the simile among my few Pakistani Moslem readers] to the Bush policykeepers.

But alas! the reality is no ruler in either country takes any action, even the most mundane, without considering what it would do to the relationship between the two rivals – no less so in India with its much larger population and, presumably, power than in Pakistan. Thus U.S. action toward either must always consider its implications, however difficult of discernment, toward the other. That complication has only grown since 9/11 and Pakistan, which had become a pariah, moved back toward collaboration with the U.S. and its partners in the fight against international clandestine Islamicist terror. [That Pakistan was a center for that particular virus only intensified the conundrum.]

It’s not hard to illustrate the same problem in a dozen “issues” now in the headlines.

One might argue it has always been thus; the Jefferson-Hamilton feud, while sometimes arraigned over real and important issues, was to some extent a false confrontation.

But the digital revolution has further intensified an old life's problem: how to distinguish between reality and perception, intensifying Washington’s Inside the Beltway politics, just as it has problems asnd their discernment throughout our society.