WTF are you thinking, dumbass?!?

OK, so now I have time to respond to the articles I mentioned last time.
To prevent this from being too incredibly long, I'm going to shrink the text and respond intermittently. I have not altered the text of the article in any way, other than to insert my comments.

The first one:

From Colin to Condoleezza
(Opinion by Eliot Cohen, Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2004)

To the role of secretary of state, Colin Powell brought enormous popularity in the U.S. and abroad, charisma and the instincts and habits of a skilled leader. He brought a fund of experience, including service as national security adviser, as well as the outlook of a prudent and moderate man. He had as his deputy a formidable friend and leader in his own right, Richard Armitage, to whom he could delegate with confidence, and on whose counsel he could rely. He won the allegiance of Foggy Bottom by doing what leaders do -- listening, making it easier for the operators to do their jobs, attending to the needs of those on the front lines.

And yet, he will not go down in history as a successful secretary of state. The two views of Mr. Powell that those about him have fostered -- loyal soldier of the administration and thwarted internal dissident -- do not quite mesh. He did not stop a war that he probably thought deeply unwise; he did not forestall a shredding of American reputation among allies and neutrals alike; he does not leave the U.S. more respected, and certainly leaves it less admired, than when he came to office.

How could he stop a war that the dictator -- I mean, president -- unilaterally pushed for? Not his fault that the US is liked even less now.

"Not his fault," some might say, and "Who cares?" others might shrug. He was up against formidable opponents within, and intractable circumstances without, no doubt: But that is not quite enough of a response. In thinking about his tenure, and in contemplating her own path forward, the new secretary of state should think about how a superbly qualified man failed to achieve what was expected of him.

One man, no matter how superbly qualified, is no match for a single-minded regime with backing from the legislative body.

The Bush administration has two great strengths in its foreign policy: backbone, and clarity of vision.

Clarity of vision is worthless when you've got blinders on. And invertebrates are generally more intelligent.

Those qualities, indispensable in time of war, have their accompanying weaknesses. Their resulting price has been sheer stubbornness, culpable tactlessness, and more dangerously, a lack of realism.

True dat.

Whether in dismissing the Kyoto treaty without suggesting some kind of alternative, or indeed treating seriously the problems it was meant to address; or in failing to acknowledge the errors and mistakes that have landed us in a full-blown guerrilla war in an Iraq that did not have the weapons a hapless secretary of state insisted to the world it did have, the administration has alienated more friends than it needed to, and made itself look arrogant to the point of blindness. The world gives us opponents enough: No need to cool our friends and heat our enemies by our own words and deeds.

Mr. Powell knew all that, but was not successful, in part because he did not make adequate use of the chief resource at his disposal. A secretary of state does not command a large budget or a vast work force. He or she cannot, as the secretary of defense can, send thousands of soldiers into battle, build roads, or catch terrorists. What the secretary has is, chiefly, the English language.

Wow. That's impressive. The vast majority of the world doesn't know English.

Aside from an impassioned speech at the U.N. and a stirring evocation of the American record in Europe at Davos, Secretary Powell will leave behind no memorable words, no speeches that clarify the American position abroad, explain it at home, or guide those who must implement it.

Who cares? Oh, wait -- I bet the current administration likes that he didn't voice more dissent.

The rhetorical function of leadership has succumbed to PowerPoint, e-mail, and telephone calls; indeed, the word "rhetoric" itself now has a pejorative connotation. But now more than ever we need rhetoric in its true sense, persuasive and illuminating speech about the troubles of our times.

As Mr. Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice should begin by casting aside the ungainly acronym GWOT, and the more obscure term for which it stands: the Global War on Terror, a term that makes as much sense as if Americans had responded to Pearl Harbor by declaring a global war on dive bombers.

Exactly. The current approach makes no sense.

She must tackle head-on the question of what the threat from Salafist terrorism is, whence it came, and how it can be combated. She must tell the world and the peoples of the Middle East what the U.S. can hope to achieve in Iraq, now that the mirage of a swift creation of a liberal state is gone.

And how does that differ from Powell's job?

She must reinvent our public diplomacy, articulating abroad the values for which the U.S. stands, using not the techniques of Madison Avenue executives (one of the failures of the first part of the administration) but speech rooted in America's history and politics.

Ah, I see: she needs to tell us what our values are, because we don't know. She must help the dictator -- ahem, president -- brainwash the part of the government (read: State Department) to go along with them.

She needs to explain how the administration will manage its new strategic partnerships, such as that with India, and its uneasy relationship with the rising power of China. She must describe what Americans expect international institutions to be able to do, and what we understand they cannot. She should, in other words, make an argument about what the world is, the extent to which we think we can shape it, and the extent to which we will be shaped by it.

Such a return to argument, persuasion and rhetoric goes against the grain of the administration; it implies a respect for opinions and discourse that it has not thus far evinced.

No kidding. They're just trampling all over everything they can.

The inner values of the administration were those of loyalty and discipline. It purchased these at the expense of vigorous debate within and reputation abroad. Too often administration members fell back on the phrase "the President thinks" or "the President believes" -- phrases more suited to the courts of monarchs than the public squares of republics. By refusing to concede an inch, to admit mistakes, to confess to surprise, to accept open disagreement as a fact of life, the administration created an image for itself of dogged arrogance -- an image at odds, in some cases, with quiet adjustments to reality out of the public view. It did so out of fear of what its political opponents might do to it with such candor, but surely that fear has now passed.

Yep. Because they've held their offices by raising irrational fear among the public.

The administration turned its back on rhetoric as well out of the comfortable certainty bred of decision-making by a small, intimate, coterie from which Mr. Powell was often excluded.

So if you exclude someone, how can you expect him to do his job properly? Easy to call someone a failure when you obstruct their progress at every turn.

In a justly famous essay, the moralist C.S. Lewis warned of the dangerous lure of the Inner Ring, the tiny group that really matters. The Inner Ring of this administration's foreign-policy makers has been very small, and if history, psychology and common sense have anything to teach, it is that such policy-making groups become contemptuous of disagreement, indifferent to contrary arguments, and at the end, impervious to reality itself. Such isolation, summed up in "trust us," or "we know what we're doing," or "the President believes," is dangerous, a sentiment with which, one suspects, Colin Powell might sadly agree.

And with that, I'd like to present this little speech. It might sound familiar:
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

No, not George W. Bush, but it could have been, or still could be -- it was Adolph Hitler, in a proclamation to the German Nation, February 1, 1933.


Next, we have the real dumbass:

The Powell Lesson
(Editorial by Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2004)
Colin Powell's departure as Secretary of State is being seen in the circles that lost the recent election as the departure of the last Administration "moderate," whatever that word is supposed to mean.

You're not off to a good start if you don't even know what "moderate" means. Try "not extreme" for starters. Try "not neocon crazy" for further clarification.

But we suspect President Bush sees it as his chance to select a successor who can turn the diplomatic corps into an ally and advocate of his foreign policy.

(aka brainwashing, since no one who actually works for the USG "in the field" could agree with the Bush administration's actions so far.)

These columns have often criticized Mr. Powell's department on policy grounds, but always with respect for the former General personally. He has brought many strengths to his diplomacy, not least his prestige both at home and abroad. His face-to-face meeting with General Musharraf helped to turn Pakistan into an antiterror ally after 9/11, a crucial step in overturning the Taliban and dismantling al Qaeda.

Mr. Powell has also proved to be personally loyal to his boss. Notwithstanding his frequent policy differences with the White House, he is a soldier at heart; once a decision was made, he saluted (even if the rest of his department didn't).

And what exactly is that supposed to mean? The State Department actually stood up against moronic policies and actions, and should be applauded for it.

His February 2003 speech to the U.N. on Iraq has been criticized on the left, but it was correct based on what everyone thought they knew at the time. Mr. Powell needn't apologize for making that case against Saddam Hussein.No doubt Mr. Powell was also too trusting of the French in going for a second Iraq resolution. But Dominique de Villepin misled him, not vice versa. And it isn't the Secretary's fault that Mr. Bush never did seem to decide between the Pentagon and State Department positions on Iran, North Korea, or, most damaging, on post-invasion policy in Iraq. That is the fault of the NSC staff, or the President himself. Mr. Powell's job was to argue his case forcefully.

State Department 1, Pentagon 0.

That said, Mr. Powell never was able to manage his department the way James Baker or George Shultz did. He arrived at State promising to improve morale, which had been brought low in the Clinton years. Fair enough. Yet his way of doing so was to represent the department's consensus views in the White House, rather than represent -- and enforce -- Bush Administration policy on his department.

Uh, buddy -- you're talking about two mutually exclusive items there: enforcing Bush administration policy on the State Department serves to lower morale, not improve it. You can't do both. Morale improved because the Bush administration policies were not forced upon the State Department.

One consequence of this approach is that Mr. Powell expended much of his political capital fighting the wrong battles. It may have gone down well with the Foggy Bottom cheering squad that the Secretary pushed -- and the President agreed -- to take Baghdad first by way of the United Nations.

But the gawd fearing, gun toting conservatives/rednecks were let down. Aw, shucks.

But if there's one lesson this and future Administrations will take away from that episode, it is never to hazard the purpose and prestige of the United States on the indulgence of semi-friendly powers.

In other words, don't listen to anybody else. Brilliant.

A second consequence of Mr. Powell's failure to take control of his department was the near-collapse of U.S. public diplomacy.

This is where you get really stupid. U.S public diplomacy nearly collapsed when Bush ordered military action in Iraq. Powell had control of his department, but it made no difference because Bush was trashing everything.

Partly this had to do with the department's misbegotten efforts to sell American values to the Middle East by way of a Madison Avenue-inspired ad campaign. But the U.S. can't be sold as a "brand," like Cheerios; what America has to "sell" are freedom and democracy.

Surely, going in guns blazing was much better than what the State Department was attempting. Besides, you need buyers in order to sell. No one was in the market for freedom and democracy.

The larger problem was that so few in the middle ranks at State -- the folks the media call "sources" -- were willing to defend and advocate the President's policies behind the scenes; nor were they pushed to do so by their often equally ambivalent higher-ups.

That's because they all saw how bad the policies were, and no one wanted to put their name behind that crap.

Instead, the department's idea of public diplomacy too often amounted to spinning itself to an obliging media as the supposed last bastion of sanity amid an Administration overrun by neocon crazies.

Which is exactly what the situation was (and still is), and exactly what they needed to do.

In one example that somehow went unpunished, Mr. Powell's own chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, described his colleagues at Defense and in the White House this way: "I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." That kind of talk may have hurt the Administration, but it hurt State far more.

It did? Looks to me like it's an excellent comparison between past dictators and our current one. And "unpunished?" I think it went uncheered.

Whoever replaces Mr. Powell (as we went to press, Condoleezza Rice's name was being whispered), her first task will be to ensure that the department acts as an arm of executive power and not as the in-house opposition.

Back to that brainwashing again. Give it a rest.

No doubt, engineering that sort of transformation will engender institutional resistance, just as it did at the Pentagon following Donald Rumsfeld's return and as it is now at the CIA with Porter Goss's (see below). So be it.

The world was transformed on 9/11; it's time our diplomats figure that out.

WTF are you thinking, dumbass?!? The diplomats are the ones who know! They're the ones out here in the world, not tucked safely behind policies and bullshit! It's time for everyone ELSE to figure it out.

If not, the Administration will simply have to conduct a real foreign policy via the National Security Council.

That is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time. Your definition of "real foreign policy" is blowing up anyone who disagrees with you? That's "terrorism." You need to be locked up.

Which reminds us: If Ms. Rice indeed switches jobs, Mr. Bush needs someone stronger than the current cast at the NSC. One of the problems of the first term isn't that different parts of the Administration disagreed; that's inevitable, even healthy.

Not according to what you've been saying.

The problem is that the NSC did a poor job of vetting those differences for the President, and an even worse job of coordinating policy decisions down through the deputy ranks. We won't doom anyone's chances by naming those who could do the job, but they include the members of his Administration who were most loyal to his first-term agenda.

Yep, that whole Inner Circle thing. Just what we need to drive the country completely into the ground, or at least to war with the rest of the world.


Well, I think that's enough for this week. Tune in next time, when maybe I will have cooled off a bit.