The War at Home

Watching Dr. Condoleezza Rice give her testimony reminded this former long-suffering "employee" of everything he hates about the modern MBA-polluted swamp that is today’s corporate life. She’s a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. And that’s no compliment.

Rather than get into whether her dissembling, "managing the bottom line" (in this case spin control and running out the clock) was right or wrong, let’s just focus on the worldview shown by her language.

I have watched the best minds of my generation driven to distraction by bean counters like Dr. Rice. The essence of what she said was slathered in the biz-speak that has infected every workplace. She talked about "institutional change," and described how she delegated duties to subordinates…and then did not follow Ronald Reagan’s wise advice to "trust and verify" that, in fact, the little people had followed through. Instead she took the absence of feedback as the absence of problems…the sort of "don’t ask, don’t tell" management that has caused so many of the troubles in our business and government workplaces.

Half way through listening to her talk of "process" and "structural problems" I was struck with how truly academic and bureaucratic she is. It’s not surprising. She knows only what she has experienced…academe and bureaucracy. To top off this analysis just remember how her boss was proudly proclaimed, by his supporters no less, to be a "hands off" manager, a modern CEO-like figure, who would run the government the way a savvy CEO ran a business. Not in the chaotic way the informal "kids" working for Clinton did things.

Rice’s testimony shows how frighteningly true this depiction of the Bush Administrative has proven to be. Maybe Clinton’s hyperactive walk-around informal style drove the more structured and corporate in the country nuts, but at least he put Dick Clarke in the principal’s meetings…that is, at the very top of the corporate chart. Anyone who ever worked in a big, bloated organization knows that this is the only place that things actually can get dealt with.

Here’s the point. Dissembling and corporate double talk about "institutional change" and "structural change" in the bureaucracy and all that is fine…during peacetime. ( As Rice said, "I'm a student of institutional change. I know that you get few chances to make really transformative institutional change." )

The fact is that the MBA language and worldview of Bush (and Rice) has led to a reality well known to anyone who works in a company (rather than for himself). You paper your ass with memos; you dissemble and avoid making decisions. You play kiss up to the boss and office politics.

Whatever you do, you do not do anything real…you just organize retreats, do studies and hold meetings…that’s how you keep your job and get ahead in the company.
(" When I was a lad I served a term/ As office boy to an Attorney's firm./ I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,/ And I polished up the handle of the big front door./ I polished up that handle so carefullee/ That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!")

But that’s not how you fight a war, especially a fluid, non-state one against global terrorism. You don’t go into battle with a PowerPoint presentation and a flip chart.

Interestingly, the only bureaucrat in the present Administration to show reluctance to rush into Iraq was Colin Powell. Need I repeat the well-known history of how Powell’s opinions about being cautious about going into Iraq were treated by the Administration’s inner circle, led by Rice?

He is also the only one who ever pulled a trigger in combat. The only one who understood that War is reality, not a theoretical exercise on a big display in the War Room. Now we reap the whirlwind that is the consequence of armchair (non)warriors outmaneuvering battle-hardened veterans (Powell is just one of them) who warned them that their plans were misguided and naïve.

Whether these same amateurs, with their PowerPoint theories, also misunderstood the importance of moving their counter-terrorism chief to the second tier of the bureaucracy, and whether they missed all the warnings given them by their intelligence community that would, or would not, have lead to the prevention of the disaster of 9/11, is painfully irrelevant now. To that extent, those whiners and spinners who complain that the "partisan" commission should talk about the future are right.

OK, here’s the future. The buck stopped on the desk of Condoleezza Rice and she muffed it. She doesn’t "remember" if she told the President about cells in the U.S. OK, now he knows, so the buck is sitting on his desk now.

Let me be clear Mr. President: The terrorists are planning to attack America before the next election. We need our assets here, now. All 100 percent of them, if we are to have a chance of thwarting another disastrous attack.

Is that a straightforward enough warning? Is that actionable? As for Iraq. Let them sort it out themselves. You want the rest of the world to help? Then start packing up and leave it to the Iraqis to ask for help.

From today on we need our troops, all of them, patrolling our power plants, trains, bus stations, natural gas lines, power grid, telephone system and bridges and tunnels. Let me repeat that, so you get it right Mr. President: We need them to be doing that right now.

There. You’ve got your warning and your "actionable plan." Mr. President tear up your Middle Eastern fantasy. Just say yes. Tell your people "Let’s roll!"

And begin to really protect America. ¶ 7:35 AM