The Iraq Study Group report was written mainly for one person to read: the President of the United States. But can he really read and understand this complex report? Here's something to help him get through it.
There is plenty of analysis of the Iraq Study Group Report available in the press and on the Web. Pundits from right to left have rendered opinions on it. Whether they have actually read the report before expounding on it, of course I don't know.
But the pundits don't matter. What really matters is whether the president has read it, right?
On Thursday President Bush commented on the report after possibly being briefed on it by visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Standing next to Blair, he commented:
Some reports are issued and just gather dust. And truth of the matter is, a lot of reports in Washington are never read by anybody. To show you how important this one is, I read it, and our guest read it. The Prime Minister read -- read a report prepared by a commission.
So I ask you--after reading this, the president's own words, do you think he really read the report? He sounds to me like a kid trying to convince the teacher that he really read The Odyssey over summer vacation.
First of all, we've been told that Bush doesn't even read the daily newspapers. He goes by his gut feelings instead, or perhaps relies on his interpretation of Divine Guidance. If he doesn't read the daily papers, it's unlikely that he is prepared to understand a document as complex as the Iraq Study Group Report, even given a reasonable time to go through it with the help of a dictionary.
Computers provide tools for analyzing the readability of documents. Here's what I discovered.
First of all, the document has 7200 Big Words. Bush has trouble even with medium-sized words (e.g., "nuclear").
The report's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score according to one program is almost 15, which means that a college graduate, perhaps someone with one year of graduate study, would be comfortable with it. The Flesch Reading Ease Index is 23. A program provided this amusing diagnosis: "You like to hear yourself write. Despairing of the thought of bringing a sentence to a close with something as demeaningly ordinary as a simple period, you shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose. Meaning lingers, albeit awash in a thick tide of metaphor and exposition that threatens to drown the writer's message."
But despite the complexity, the document uses very straightforward language. The authors did their best to make their points clear to Bush. There are very few "Bullshit" terms: strategic (22 occurrances), leverage (2), global (12), empower (1), benchmark (2). The Bull Composite Index (originally produced by Deloitte Consulting) is midrange,: 4.4. In other words, the authors are giving it to him straight.
Finally, the document has almost 32,000 words. Especially if one is not used to reading, it just takes time to go through something this long and with so many Big Words. He probably had other things to do too, between the release of the report and his comments standing alongside Blair.
Disappeared News, as a public service and special gift to the president, has used computer technology to produce a summarization of the document that is only 10% of its full length. The entire Appendix has been skipped because who reads appendices anyway. The summary was produced entirely by computer, without the interference of human judgment. Of course, a lot is omitted, but reading this summary might get one through the final exam. Sort of like a "Cliff Note" for the entire report.
GWB or anyone interested can find this summary at:
http://disappearednews.com/....
You're welcome, Mr. President.