Larry Wilkerson, the Powell aide who told us in a speech last week that Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of a “cabal” running the country, expounds further in an L.A. Times op-ed this morning.
He concludes:
Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).
It’s a disaster. Given the choice, I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.
Not to worry, the mother of all shit storms is heading right for them.
I couldn’t agree with Wilkerson more, especially about what Cheney’s done to the military.
Buried in all this reporting is a very insightful point that Wikerson made in his speech that decisions made by a closed group and forced on an organization just don’t get carried out.
Its quicker and more satisfying for a core group of ideologues to formulate a directive and impose it on the organization, but people who did not get a chance to have any input and were not allowed to participate in the deliberation just don’t carry out the directive.
Wilkerson is an army officer who has experience in leading people with a responsibility for getting the job done. He knows that you have to let people participate in decisions, have their say and know that they have been taken into account.
If you let people process the decisions they will invest in their success, otherwise they get rebellious and obstructive. Anyone who has worked under a bad boss knows this.
The people who have risen to the top of this administration may be smart in some kind of ways, but they have no understanding of people or govenment. They think you can get things done dictatorially and by force.
I learned more about politics running a church congregation than Karl Rove did running GWB’s governor’s office and presidency. I learned that you cannot run over people and take them a direction they do not want to go with out a long process of talking and leading.
This is the cource of their disaster in Iraq. They thought that they could send an army into a country and impose a govenment and a way of life on other people who did not ask for this, that you can chop off one dictator off the top and impose another one and no one would care.
And they want to run things through the congress and the courts by using the power of their (very slim) majority to overrun the opposition. When you do this, you may get your laws passed, but you also get a rebellion and an insurrection by the minority who now has nothing to lose.
This is the way you create an insurrection and eventually create terrorism, when you have people who believe they are treated unjustly, are ignored and have no chance to stand up for their grievances through ordinary political means.