politics

Riffing on Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan nails it:

Late empires are known for several things: a self-obsessed, self-serving governing class, small over-reaching wars that bankrupt the Treasury, debt that balloons until retreat from global power becomes not a choice but a necessity, and a polity unable to address reasonably any of these questions -- or how the increasing corruption of the media enables them all.

Obama is, in some ways, a test-case.

He was elected on a clear platform of reform and change; and yet the only real achievement Washington has allowed him so far is a massive stimulus package to prevent a Second Great Depression (and even on that emergency measure, no Republicans would support him). On that he succeeded. But that wasn't reform; it was a crash landing after one of the worst administrations in America's history.

Real reform -- tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it -- except to their own families and cronies.

Nepotism is part of the problem; media corruption is also part; the total uselessness of the Democratic party and the nihilism of the Republicans doesn't help. But something is rotten in America at this moment in time; and those of us who supported Obama to try and change this decay and decline should use this fall to get off our butts and fight for change."

Wish I'd said that. And it makes me wonder: would Obama agree with the above (meaning he is a reluctant prisoner of well-entrenched interests), or is he is part of the problem too?

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Am I the only person who sees a parallel between the furor over the Scottish decision to release convicted Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and the heated debate over whether to investigate possible criminal misconduct during the Bush administration "torture regime?"

With respect to the former, many people are upset by the decision to release al-Megrahi -- who has terminal prostate cancer and only a few months to live -- because they do not think an act of mercy was warranted in his case. Fair enough; reasonable people can legitimately disagree about whether the dying man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing deserves any form of clemency. But the real anger stems from the suspicion that al-Megrahi's release was part of some larger deal, and that British officials traded the release for commercial or political advantages. In other words, opponents of the decision to release him are incensed because they believe government officials let broader political or business considerations interfere with an important issue of criminal justice.

Yet those who oppose an open-ended investigation into what the Bush administration did -- which might eventually lead to the prosecution of top officials -- are doing the same thing for which British officials are being criticized: they are saying that politics should outweigh the requirements of law and justice. In essence, they are saying that broader political considerations should trump the normal operations of the criminal justice system. Yet I suspect most of the people making this argument would be outraged if it turned out that the British government decided to release al Megrahi in part to cultivate Libyan business or secure other political advantages.  

For a country that claims to revere the "rule of law," this really isn't a hard issue conceptually. Attorney General Holder's task is to determine whether laws may have been broken, and whether an investigation of the alleged wrongdoing is warranted. Once that investigation has been conducted, he then has decide if he has a strong enough case to warrant prosecution. If he thinks he does, the case goes forward, and defendants get their day in court. Politics isn't supposed to have anything to do with this process (though a sensible prosecutor would probably be especially reluctant to bring a weak case against prominent senior officials). Finally, if any defendants are found guilty, the president could then step in and issue a pardon, if he felt that doing so was in the best interests of the nation.

Note that it is still possible to criticize and debate every aspect of this process, but not by invoking partisanship, political expediency, or the need to "look forward rather than backward." People can disagree about whether there is enough evidence of wrongdoing to warrant further investigation (though I think the recent revelations make it hard to make the case that there is simply no basis for a further investigation). If AG Holder decides to indict anyone, or if he declines to do so, people will undoubtedly disagree about what he should have done so based on the available evidence. And if the cases go to trial we can argue about them too. If the defendants are acquitted, people will say the case should never have been brought; if convicted, some will claim they were railroaded. If people are convicted and the president pardons them, no doubt there would be heated discussions about whether this was appropriate or not.

But the key point is that if you genuinely believe in the rule of law, you can't invoke political expediency as a guide to whether possible crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. And the fact that the Attorney-General has decided to go forward should be seen as very positive sign, because it shows that he is willing to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities even if it is politically inconvenient for the president who appointed him. I have no doubt that the president would prefer to "look forward," because an investigation and/or prosecution will drive both the CIA and the right-wing media types crazy and because he's got enough alligators to wrestle with already. But he also promised us that he would end the politicization of the Department of Justice that his predecessor practiced, and Holder's decision, however inconvenient for Obama, is a reassuring sign that there is still life in the U.S. Constitution.

Am I being -- shall we say, unrealistic -- to stress the rule of law as opposed to the naked exercise of political power? Hardly. Realists have a rather dim view of human nature, which is why we like legitimate, well-ordered governments in which laws and checks and balances exist to keep human frailties in check. The Founding Fathers had a lot of realist instincts, so they constructed a variety of essentially liberal institutions to try to address and contain our worst instincts. Domestic politics in a well-ordered society is a lot nicer than life in the international system, which conspicuously lacks strong institutions and where the rule of law is weak. And that's why we ought to defend the rule of law in this case (and others), and try hard to keep politics out of the discussion.

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I'm no expert on health care, so I don't have strong views on how to reform the current U.S. system. But watching the lies, chicanery, and sheer wing-nuttery of the "debate" on health care reform (along with the birther controversy, the revelations about "The Family," and various other manifestations of what Richard Hofstader called the "paranoid style" of American politics) led me to wonder about possible foreign policy implications.

Here's my question: What impression do people in other countries get when they observe the divorced-from-reality nature of contemporary American political discourse? American pundits like to talk about how "irrational" our adversaries are (usually when they are trying to scare us into spending more on weapons or launching preventive wars), but do they ever stop to think about how goofy and irrational we appear to be to others? And I don't just mean the buffoons on talk radio and Fox News; I'm talking about Senators, Congresspersons, and other prominent politicos. When I see some of these folks in action, even a realist like me begins to question the validity of the "rational actor" assumption.

The United States doesn't have a monopoly on extremist politicians, of course, but it is a lot more powerful. No wonder unpolarity makes even our allies nervous.

David Brooks's insight and intellectual integrity have never impressed me much, but his column in today's NY Times is a low mark even for him. After reminding us that he read Edmund Burke in college and used to be a liberal, he announces that the fate of Obama’s programs will be "the big test" between liberal and conservative views of the world. Liberals supposedly believe in human reason and the capacity of government to conduct transformative solutions; conservatives are "epistemologically modest" and skeptical of "top-down" initiatives. Here's the money quote:

We're on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited...If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity."

Such shamelessly partisan pseudo-intellectualism is Brooks's stock-in-trade, but where he's been the past eight years? George W. Bush and the GOP conservatives inherited a strong economy and a budget surplus, and a country whose international image was mostly favorable. And then they squandered them all with a thoroughness that almost seems deliberate. There was no "epistemological modesty" involved when Bush placed loyalty above competence and let lobbyists and other special interests loose in Washington, or when he launched a foolish and ill-planned war in an attempt to transform the entire Middle East. And let us not forget that Brooks himself was an enthusiastic supporter of these policies; I guess he forgot his Burke back when his party was in power.

The result of these "conservative" policies, as we all know to our sorrow, is the most serious combination of domestic and foreign policy challenges to face America in decades. But if Obama fails to clean up the mess left by his predecessor, it is "liberalism" that will have failed. Huh?

I was thinking about two former American government employees this weekend, and how the differences between them tell us a lot about why the United States is in so much trouble today.
 
The first person is Eugene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director immortalized in the film Apollo 13. I watched a rerun of the film on Friday night, and was struck again by his remarkable leadership of the team that improvised the astronauts' rescue after an in-flight explosion crippled their spacecraft and placed their lives in peril. Many readers probably remember the moment in the film when Kranz tells his colleagues: "Failure is not an option." This line may have been apocryphal, but when I survey the landscape of problems we face at home and abroad, I wish we had more people like Kranz in key leadership positions.

Yes I know, it's just a movie, but Ed Harris's portrayal is consistent with what we know about Kranz himself. Above all, Kranz was a leader who took full responsibility for his actions. Here's what he told his colleagues after the tragic fire on the launching pad of Apollo 1, a fire that killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we... Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'...We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. ... From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do...Competent means we will never take anything for granted...When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."

That is the kind of attitude that lands men on the moon, builds a healthy economy, and when necessary, wins wars.

Now compare that frank and honest statement with the behavior of another former government employee: Richard Perle. In a recent article in The National Interest and a public appearance at the Nixon Center, Perle has tried to sell the story that neither he nor his fellow neoconservatives had any significant influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and especially the decision to invade Iraq. Specifically, he denounces the supposedly "false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative 'ideologues.'" He suggests that no one has ever documented this claim, either conveniently ignoring the many books and articles that did exactly that, or misrepresenting what these works actually say.

Given that Iraq turned into a debacle that the United States is having trouble escaping, it is hardly surprising that Perle is denying his role now. But that's not what he said back when the war looked more promising. In an interview with journalist George Packer, recounted in the latter's book The Assassins' Gate, Perle described the key role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq War happen. 

If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it."

The "people who wound up in important positions" were key neoconservatives like Douglas Feith, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others, who had been openly calling for regime change in Iraq since the late 1990s and who used their positions in the Bush administration to make the case for war after 9/11, aided by a chorus of sympathetic pundits at places like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Weekly Standard. The neocons were hardly some secret cabal or conspiracy, as they were making their case loudly and in public, and no serious scholar claims that they "bamboozled" Bush and Cheney into a war. Rather, numerous accounts have documented that they had been openly pushing for war since 1998 and they continued to do so after 9/11. As neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan later admitted, he and his fellow neoconservatives were successful in part because they had a "ready-made approach to the world" that seemed to provide an answer to the challenges the U.S. faced after 9/11.

The bottom line is simple: Richard Perle is lying. What is disturbing about this case is is not that a former official is trying to falsify the record in such a brazen fashion; Perle is hardly the first policymaker to kick up dust about his record and he certainly won't be the last. The real cause for concern is that there are hardly any consequences for the critical role that Perle and the neoconservatives played for their pivotal role in causing one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history. If somebody can help engineer a foolish war and remain a respected Washington insider -- as is the case with Perle -- what harm is likely to befall them if they lie about it later?

Let's keep a few facts in mind. Perle and his neoconservative buddies helped develop and sell a policy that has left over 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 30,000 wounded, was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and will end up costing the United States more than a trillion dollars. Yet instead of having the integrity and courage to acknowlege his role and admit his mistakes -- as an honest man like Gene Kranz would -- Perle now offers us a squid's ink cloud of lies and prevarications. Although his absurd claims have been promptly and properly challenged, does anyone seriously think he will pay a larger price? The National Interest was all-too-willing to publish his rewriting of the historical record, and no doubt prestigious organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will be happy to give him a platform at future meetings. Look for him on the Lehrer Newshour and CNN too; heck, he could even end up with his own show on Fox News.

Let's face it: there is little or no accountability in Washington, where being wrong means never having to say you're sorry; indeed, you don't even have to admit responsibility for past mistakes, no matter how serious. It's just the American taxpayer who ends up footing the bill, along with the soldiers who fought and died for these blunders.

As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes -- until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle -- we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust.

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Yesterday's New York Times contained three interesting items that deserve to be read together. Taken as a whole, they tell you a lot about the fundamental challenge facing Barack Obama.

The first item was Frank Rich's op-ed column, a jeremiad about Washington's insider culture. Rich nicely describes a world where out-of-touch elites with the right connections continue to enjoy ready access to power. Rich focuses his attention on Tom Daschle's fall from grace and the prominent role of economic advisors "who are either alumni of the financial bubble's insiders club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe." His broader point, however, is that Washington is infused with a culture of non-accountability and intellectual incest that helps explain why so many policy initiatives are ill-conceived or ineptly executed, or both.

The second article was a page 1 profile of special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who is now Obama's point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke is a long-time Washington insider who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and was the driving force behind the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian civil war. (He was also managing editor of Foreign Policy back in the 1970s). Since 2001, he has been vice-chairman of Perseus LLC, a Manhattan-based private equity firm. According to the article, "During the Bush years, Perseus was Mr. Holbrooke's base, providing him with what friends say was a relatively undemanding job and lavish compensation as he bounced from topic to topic, almost as if seeking a problem tough enough to rivet all of his attention." Unfortunately, one of the topics he landed on was the invasion of Iraq, which he strongly supported. Holbrooke said Colin Powell's infamous U.N. Security Council speech "documenting" Iraq's fictitious WMD programs (an episode Powell later recalled as the "lowest moment of his life") was "a masterful job of diplomacy." While critical of the Bush administration's pre-war diplomacy, Holbrooke nonetheless argued that Saddam Hussein "was the most dangerous governmental leader in the world," and that the United States had "a legitimate right to take action."

Which brings us to item No. 3 (also on page 1): an unflattering article describing how Afghan President Hamid Karzai has gone from being Washington's best hope for success to being regarded as a weak and ineffective leader of what may be the most corrupt regime in the world. Buried in the article is a telling sentence: "Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban." That's right: the same Iraq war that Holbrooke backed.

Put these three separate articles together, and you get a good sense of how U.S. policy gets made. Powerful people with the right connections rise to important roles in government. When not in power, they land lucrative jobs that still leave them with lots of time to engage in public life, spending most of it hobnobbing with other people with similar backgrounds, advantages, and world-views, while building the connections they will need to get back into power later on. (Holbrooke apparently spent some of his Perseus earnings hosting an annual dinner for Hillary Clinton, replete with a set of A-list guests). And then the political wheel turns, and they return to public life, eager to solve the very problems they helped create.

Like most elites, the current policy establishment is a forgiving culture that cherishes conventional wisdom and rarely punishes anyone for being wrong -- even about big things -- provided that they know the right people. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it exactly wrong: for at least some American lives, there's no end to second chances.

My point here isn't to single out Ambassador Holbrooke, who is talented and tenacious and has some genuine accomplishments to his credit, and who is hardly a poster child for the adage "to get along, go along." In fact, given our current circumstances, I wish we had a few more Holbrookes to put to work on our current challenges.

My aim is simply to highlight Obama's basic dilemma. He has huge problems to solve and not a lot of time to do it. So he needs to work with the institutions and individuals that are currently entrenched in the Washington-New York nexus. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, "you go to work with the government you have." But it is those same institutions and individuals who created the mess we're in. If Obama tackles that dysfunctional power structure head-on it will go to the mattresses to defend itself, thereby making it harder to address the immediate problems we face. But if he doesn't establish new ways of doing the public's business, the old problems will persist and derail his efforts anyway. I don't see an obvious way out of this box, so I'm hoping the President is a lot smarter than me.

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How can we tell if change has really come to Washington, and how will we know that Obama is really governing well?

Ironically, one indicator is how many of his own appointees he ends up firing in his first couple of years in office. I'm not talking about a case like Tom Daschle -- who hadn't even unpacked his office and got tripped up for failing to pay all his taxes -- I'm talking about letting people go because they aren't performing well once in office.

You might think that having to fire people is a sign of poor leadership, and the GOP is bound to spin it that way. But in fact, being willing to let people go will be a reassuring sign that Obama is focused first and foremost on results.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I'm not hoping for failure. In fact, I hope Obama and his team turn out to be the most inspired, dedicated and successful public servants we've ever seen. But I'm a realist, and I don't expect perfection. So I'll be worried if all the new appointees are in place a year or two from now and I'll be reassured if a few heads have rolled.

Here's why. Even when you assemble an experienced team with glittering resumes, some appointees inevitably turn out to be not very good at their jobs. This happens in every administration, as people who previously held mid-level jobs move up and take on more demanding responsibilities, as some officials take charge of unfamiliar policy areas, and as some fresh faces get handed big assignments. Inevitably, some appointees will perform well while others turn out to be in over their heads. There's no great mystery here: lots of companies pick the wrong CEO even though they looked great on paper, and universities sometimes appoint presidents or deans who seem ideal when they're hired and are disappointing once in office. Plenty of head coaches and top draft choices don't live up to expectations either.

This problem will be particularly serious for the Obama administration, because they have inherited an array of nearly-unprecedented challenges. In addition to lengthy list of foreign policy problems, (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Darfur, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, climate change, etc.), the new team has a big to-do list here at home (health care, infrastructure, education, etc.) and an economy that is uncharted waters. Indeed, on that last item -- the economy -- nobody is quite sure what to do.   

This means that the failure rate is bound to be even higher for Obama's team than it would be for an administration dealing with more normal circumstances. It's a bit like what happens when a country goes to war after a long era of peace. They often discover that their top commanders are better at managing budgets than winning on the battlefield, and so they spend the first couple of years burning through a lot of generals until they find a few who can actually fight and win. Look at Abraham Lincoln, who went through six different top generals (McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker and Meade) before he finally found Ulysses S. Grant.

Obviously, too high a turnover rate can be worrisome, too. It takes time to find replacements and get them up to speed, and having to let people go is distracting and erodes political capital. It is always tempting for a President to reward loyalty, and to hang on to trusted subordinates even when they aren't living up to expectations. But it's a mistake, and especially when there is so much that needs to be done and needs to be done well. And if we need to be reminded of that fact, just remember the last eight years. The Bush administration consistently prized loyalty more than competence, which is why Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales kept their jobs as long as they did and why Condoleezza Rice got promoted to Secretary of State after a dismal performance as National Security Advisor, with predictably mediocre results.

Given our current circumstances, priority must be placed on finding people who can do their jobs not just adequately but outstandingly. I'm confident that some of Obama's appointees will do just that, but I am equally sure that some of them won't. I've got no idea who will fall in each category, but I hope Obama is ruthless about weeding out the folks who don't measure up. That would be change we could believe in.

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The New York Times reports that President Obama will appoint former Senator George Mitchell as his chief envoy on Israel-Palestine. According to Jewish Week, ADL national director Abraham Foxman thinks Mitchell is an inappropriate choice because he is "fair," and has been "meticulously even-handed." As Matt Yglesias points out, fairness is a quality that we normally prize in an envoy.

Foxman says this approach is wrong because our policy hasn't been "even-handed" in the past. But has he noticed that our long-standing policy of one-sided support hasn't been working out so well for the United States, or for Israel? Experienced Middle East diplomats like Aaron David Miller and former Ambassador Dan Kurtzer understand that our mediation efforts will fail if we act like Israel's lawyer, and make it clear that we need envoys who are seen as credible by both sides. To repeat myself: it's time to redefine what being "pro-Israel" means. I think Obama may get this, even if Foxman doesn't.