Two mistakes: Homeland Security Dept., Rumsfeld's Iraq

Two mistakes: Homeland Security Dept., Rumsfeld's Iraq

February 17, 2006. Copyright by the Chicago Sun Times

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Last week, as the congressional hearings on Hurricane Katrina droned on, I happened to read George Packer's memorable book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate. Sociologists are fascinated by bureaucracy because Max Weber, one of sociology's founding fathers, studied bureaucrats closely and wondered whether they would work. Could any governmental bureaucracy have coped with Katrina?

The committee of House Republicans lambasted the Department of Homeland Security from top to bottom for its past and ongoing failures. Could a more nimble and alert bureaucracy have responded better than a hastily assembled and ill-fitting hodgepodge of disparate agencies, each jealous of its own freedom, presided over by political hacks?

DHS came into being so that the Bush administration might seem to be doing something constructive about homeland security when in fact it was merely manipulating organizational charts. The underlying rationale was that an agency designed to protect Americans from terrorists would also be able to protect Americans from natural disasters. Clearly, it could not do the latter, and it seems unlikely that it can do the former.

Could a more focused agency, led by highly trained and charismatic specialists -- or supervised by a sophisticated and intelligent president -- have done a better job? We will never know the answer to that question as long as critical positions are filled by men whose talents are based on political loyalty and personal financial contributions or skill at bureaucratic infighting. Could a corporate CEO who has been in and out of administrations for 20 years and learned the art of pleasing presidents, preside successfully over a war in a distant country about which most Americans -- including himself -- know practically nothing?

The answer is that a man like Donald Rumsfeld could certainly take charge of such a war. He elbowed aside Secretary of State Colin Powell, ignored National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, turned CIA director George Tenet into a babbling sycophant, and browbeat the military leadership into submission. All he needed was memos from the neo-conservatives to fight such a war. As should be patent by now, he made a terrible mess of it. The American military contingent was too small by half, ill prepared in equipment and training to contain the early looting and the ongoing guerrilla war it is still fighting, uneducated in the history and the ethnic politics of Iraq, unable to restore and sustain the country's oil industry, and generally insensitive to the hopes and fears of the Iraqi people.

The United States was the only superpower in the world. It possessed a mighty array of military technology, from smart bombs to killer drones. With the help of friendly local support and ingenious special force units, it would be relatively easy to institute a democratic regime in Iraq and thus (to the joy of the neo-conservatives) take pressure off Israel. It did not have to plan in minute detail what should be done after the war was over.

Packer admits that he tended to support the war at the beginning and still thinks it could be won. He has great sympathy for the hard work and bravery of the Americans. An extraordinarily gifted writer, he portrays the Iraqis with sensitivity and sympathy that one rarely reads in shorter and more simplified accounts of Iraq.

Yet the war has been a series of blunders from beginning to end. The worse crime was not the deception of the American people in the reasons for the war but the failure to plan for the postwar situation, to describe what really went wrong and to take responsibility for it.

''I came to believe that those in positions of high responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one."

What kind of a man should preside over a war, if there is to be one? The lesson of both Vietnam and Iraq is that the last sort of person to be responsible for war -- especially with a president who admits no mistakes -- is a brilliant, hard-charging corporate executive. Of such men war criminals are made.