The reason why doing what I advocate in my previous post is so hard is that Congress has done their best to tie the executive's hands. As Tom points out, Bush isn't willing to give this guy the power he needs. With the way Congress is set up, it's very hard to give it to him.
Searching for the Secretary of Everything Else
THOMAS BARNETT
ARTICLE: 3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar': Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan, By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post April 11, 2007; Page A01
Wow! Can it get any more obvious?
The White House begging retired 4-stars to assume a "war czar" role that will focus on winning the peace and--apparently, given all rejections to date--be anything but a czar (our skill at picking oxymoronic names knows no bounds).
The obvious goal?
Somebody to supersede and transcend the obviously under-powered, unambitious, overwhelmed and wholly dysfunctional interagency leadership process currently mismanaged by a senior National Security Council staff member (as anonymous as they come), whose departure, along with just-finished strategic reviews, is the declared bureaucratic trigger for the search.
Yeah, right!
But just as clear as the administration's desperation to get some unity of action across Defense, State, and USAID through unity of command in some new SECEVELSE, is its continuing unwillingness to really invest this putative "czar" with any real power (thus, the turn-downs).
Bush wants the "man on the white horse" (Iraq-the-System-Perturbation continues to roil our system almost as much as the Middle East), but hasn't made the leap of logic to the full department.
But look at how the pain drives movement to the obvious conclusion?
Pascuel, who ran the first wee little office in State that OSD launched across the Potomac cynically (Feith) a while back in a transparent and futile attempt to toss that tar baby in somebody else's lap, says the search for a man isn't the answer, fixing the bad policy is.
Well, duh!
But the search for the man is really only the tip-of-the-iceberg expression of the growing bureaucratic impulse to create a funding/power center of gravity in the system to transcend the clearly broken IA process, which the president owns second-hand through the NSC, which in this administration remains weak to Cheney's Veep (by design).
Why this search can come to no good end, of course, is because Cheney's power remains just enough intact to convince those being asked to take on the job to realize it's a doomed position.
Still, it's stunning to see the administration reach so baldly for this inevitable fix.
DoEE is coming all right, right on schedule--the schedule of failure and pain and political desperation.
Yes, yes, the SysAdmin force/function is a pipe dream all right--until you recognize the nightmare won't end without it. |
