Put the policies aside for the moment. Whether you like the Bush Admininstration's approach to the world or not,its approach to governance-- one in which no higher-up is ever held accountable for poor performance, incompetence, malfeasance or nonfeasanace-- really rankles. This past week, of course, the spotlight in this area has been on Abu Ghraib. Lieutenant General Janis Karpinski was demoted to Colonel, effectively ending her career. But General Richard Sanchez, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, Sanchez's deputy in Iraq and his intelligence chief,respectively, were exonerated by the Army. President Bush subsequently okayed the punishment for Karpinski.
We are long past the point where anybody could accept the idea with a straight face that the mistreatment and torture of prisoners was a set of isolated acts by a handful of low level individuals at Abu Ghraib prison. We can argue about whether there was any official policy from the highest levels to encourage or allow humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, much less torture. What is inarguable is that there were clear signs for many months before the revelations that bad things were happening at Abu Ghraib, and no one at the top levels of the Army, the Pentagon or the White House did anything to investigate further or to get to the bottom of them. Underlings may pay, but those at the top will not.
Abu Ghraib is not the only example. In the FBI, the failures to upgrade the computer system-- after repeated pledges by Director Bob Mueller to the 9/11 Commission, among others, and after spending hundreds of millions of dollars-- has not seen a single visible head roll.
Heads don't roll these days; quite the opposite. Consider General Tommy Franks. Here is a quote from a 2004 story by Barton Gellman, the respected military reporter of the Washington Post: "Soon after arriving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1, 2001, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers raised doubts about the war plan -- days from execution -- to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of U.S. Central Command, planned a single thrust toward the Afghan capital from the north.
Franks anticipated, correctly, that resistance from Taliban and al Qaeda fighters would collapse. He did not, however, position a blocking force to meet them as they fled. Some Bush administration officials now acknowledge privately they consider that a costly mistake."
That costly mistake was followed by Franks' game plan in Iraq, involving a stripped-down military force that anticipated, correctly, that resistance from Saddam's military and Republican Guards would collapse. But it left no plan in place for securing ammunition dumps and armories from looting, for securing order in Iraq or preparing for the aftermath of the collapse of the government. The result has been headaches and heartaches, and more death and destruction than should have been the case.
So what happened to Tommy Franks? A Medal of Freedom.
In any sound management system, the people at the top are responsible and should be held accountable for serous failure, whether they are directly complicit in the failure or not. That is fundamental, ethical management policy, whether it is in the military, civilian government, business, religion or anything else. For a Republican, conservative administration-- one that wants to shift from the nanny state to individual accountability, from welfare to Social Security, and one that believes in markets where good performance is rewarded and bad performance is punished-- it ought to be black letter policy. In an Administration that hates to admit mistakes, it is not.