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In a long 5-webpage article New York Times published Michiko Kakutani's article, bearing the awkward-to-say-the-least title, "All the President's Books (Minding History's Whys and Wherefores)." The title is misleading; I went to it because I thawt readers mite be treated to a discussion of the books Bush has been reading in his too-few spare moments since he entered the wartime presidency. Natan Scharanski would be one of the author's on the list, and so would Abraham Kuyper's Princeton Lectures. But nothing like this obtains.
Instead in NYT's series "Critic's Notebook," we get a synthesis of everyone's book about the Presidency of George W. Bush, but not even that. There is a limit and a definitely non-neutral line of ideology whereby Kakutani produces a majority-rules judgment ostensibly on Bush's "management style." I must say there is some attention to the chief executive's management style in the Kakutani metareview, and his write-up is just that - a metareview - not a management review such as you would expect to get from a professor of management at an accredited grad school of business. It's a tale-spinning "review" of "reviews." not based on any direct contact with the President himself, but rather on books that others wrote who (for the larger part) either served under Bush, were found inadequate and let go, or who talked to people who had contact with Bush, sometimes one suspects with considerable malice aforethawt.
In other words, the genre of the article is itself disputable, as well as disreputable for its reliance on the disputatiousness of voluble discontentos.
Kakutani's is the kind of review I would have to have written, a survey of other people's write-ups of the Chief - who is, of course, the chief execuivtive officer of the United States and the Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces - but I'm sure that the positive reviews would have gotten more attention from me than Kakutani is able to accord either the positives of David Frum or Fred Barnes, while Kakatuni does seize one statement from Barnes and then saw on it as tho it were some Holy Writ to be floated up from context and bloated into an abstract proposition to be absolutized as the Definitive Truth about the man(agement style of the President).
Here's the Barnesism that now is stamped on the President's forehead by Kakatuni:
...[I]n Rebel-in-Chief, his recent paean to the president, Fred Barnes describes Mr. Bush as an innovative leader who "operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of insurgents," a visionary who finds it "easy to overturn major policies with scarcely a second thought."
While it doesn't have to be taken pejoratively, that's the usage to which Kookatuni puts it. So, with a floated bloated Barnesian boosterism as its motto, the entire article becomes a kakophony of many axes grinding simultaneously to bring down Bush's service to the country under the pretence that he's obliged to obey a hundred thousand bureaucrat "specialists," each with his/her debate-opponents within the lot of them. Kakookchiecoo hasn't a clue that Bush's management method with a bureaucracy built by Clinton is a legit alternative (take the glaring example of the CIA, for instance, where even the "moderate Republicans" have been said to be undermining the Chief's policy from the begining, largely continuing its pre-9/11 bad habits at least until the arrival of the new Director Peter Goss, devoted to the status quo and incompetent even to "run" intelligence field agents, a debating society and little more).
Or, if Kaktuni does have a clue, he does everything he can to head-off a calm management-science appraisal of Bush, a wartime president.
This NYT's writer does all this with rhetorical aplomb: "smacks of arrogance and hubris," "disregard for both history and long-term consequences," "stubborness," "lack of common sense" (all these are deftly lifted from one-time Bush-considerate Francis Fukuyama). "simple solution, bumper sticker description of problem," "no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already knew the answers" (Richard A. Clarke), "out-of-channels policymaking," "almost crisis-atmosphere meetings, making decisions on the fly," intelligence "cherry-picked," "idées fixes," established "parallel process" to "statutory process" (a key management strategy to a labyrinthine complex of bureaucratic red-tapestry, I mite add, when a business culture is obstructive and turf-guarding against other bureaucrats and competitors in the same bureau, as typical of the post-Clinton civil-service up to its h+est levels, entrenched by his divertissement), "somewhat ad hoc, "disorganized," Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin > "working 'out of channels,' issuing directives without ever having their plans scrubbed in the kind of tedious, iterative process that the government typically uses to make sure it is ready for any contingency" (but these weren't Bush's doings, even if true, as they dealt with the nuts and bolts of occupation of Iraq).
Fukuyama goes after neocons in govt instead, whereas Bush is not and never has been a neo-conservative: "neoconservative policymakers, who felt they had been looked down upon by the foreign policy establishment for years, were 'excessively distrustful of anyone who did not share their views.' " More to the point regarding the huge number of leftovers from Clinton-period hirings (another detail that Kukatani never analyzes as we noted regarding the CIA, this time the same thing in the State Department): "ideological and turf battles."
Virtually every book about the war in Iraq -- whether by a reporter, or a military, intelligence or Coalition Provisional Authority insider -- is replete with examples in which expert advice was ignored or rebuffed by the administration.
But, of course, what would one expect of leftover Clintonite experts engaged in ideological and turf battles whose advice was not taken? And who writes "insider" books but those passed over, kicked out, or self-important and self-justifying grumps - remember we are talking of a horde, of many thousands from among whom only a few can see their ideas carried forward or picked up by h+er-ups to be made into policy. It's from the horde that a sampling emerges to become bookwriters of a classy kind of
Enquirer sort, which kind necessarily can't be sold if the volume of each is either under-dramatic or onlty meagerly-critical. It's the book business to which these debate-club bureaucrats turn when they're turfed.
Then, there's the general Takutani-take on the size of the military force used in Iraq that becomes irksome in its tendentiousness against the Chief: but it's not the Commander-in-Chief's provenance, the buck stops with Rumsfeld (not Bush) who did not go along with reports of think tanks:
The Rand Corporation, the Army War College, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University also produced reports, Mr. Packer notes, that "were striking for their unanimity of opinion": "Security and reconstruction in postwar Iraq would require large numbers of troops for an extended period, and international cooperation would be essential." These troops would be needed to seal the country's borders, secure armament caches, contain local militias and restore a sense of law and order. Last month, Colin Powell gave an interview in which he said that he too had recommended before the war that a higher number of troops be sent to Iraq.
What are the counter-arguments that impressed Rumsfeld more than Powell and like-minded on the troop size? One doesn't have to be editor of
Foreign Affairs or a student of military logistics to understand there are no infallible judgments to be made here. That the whole lot of analysists cited could have been then, and could yet be mistaken, that there may have been no good solution to the issue, only a least worst as far as they/we knew/know, and that Kakutani is being disingenuous when he cherry-picks Packer's remarks, without giving the counter-arguments which were available to another thousand specialists on the multitude of factors that had to be weighed.
Hindsight, even in Rumsfeld's case, can't replace the existential responsiblity of making a choice in the moment when it has to be made by that particular official, according to the info on hand then.
"Warnings not heeded" - how many hundreds of thousands of warnings were out there on almost every topic, a vast ocean of opinionated noise. The term "warning" carries no inherent moral force, no matter which wordsmith is deploying it, as anyone who has been falsely warned thru the course of life knows. As anyone could know who cares to recall, the entire structure of the war was delayed by
1.) the UN's failure to act, which Bush compliantly waited out until too late because at that point he still thawt the UN was valuable enuff to give it more time (I could say this was a terrible error on Bush's part, but what's the sense in that? - no more than much of what Kakutani says of Rumsfeld, misdirecting the K-ire at Bush);
and 2.) our NATO ally Turkey switched position at the last minute, using its support as a bargaining chip, and then refused to allow US military personnel and equipment to off-load for the run overland from Turkish ports to the theatre of war at a place where Rumsfled and the generals had planned to open in Northern Iraq in a 2-pronged initial strategy. These two factor's necessitated a re-jigging of the entire war plan, and could easily have been a key to the matter of the size of the force. Still, Rumsfeld tried to keep the total numbers down, a decision that may indeed have been insisted upon by Bush for political reasons. So to think Kakutani adds even one scintilla of wisdom on this topic, is as erroneous as were the presumptions of Powell, Packer, and the pack. None were in a better position to know the magic number than the Secretary of Defense and his Commander in Chief.
Well, dear readers, I've taken you thru the Kakutani tune, exhibiting the rhetorical tenor of his mordantly obsessive overkill of Bush's management style, thru the first three pages of his five pages. I break off now here, and am not sure I'll be in the mood to come back to finish combing all 5 of the Takutani effort (altho I've read then all, of course).
What I have presented from NYTutani is his exercize in overdetermination of the subject matter, too tilted to one side without any serious presenation of counter-assessments on almost every point he makes, often misdirecting his malice onto the President, on the two assumptions necessary to his thesis, that the President is to blame for everyting that happens in his administration and for not obeying every bureaucratic Tom, Dick, and Harry competing with every other b-crat in the field - of course, an impossible task. And ulitmately evidence for nothing other than Mr Kakutani's capacity for irrationality, and NYT's capacity for publishing such. - Politicarp
Further resources:
Issue-management hidden by Kakutani
Another case where Kakutani proves inept
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