Management has Failed

When I was an Air Force Radio Maintenance instructor, I learned to use "stories" so that my students, in the first 4 weeks of their studies would more readily understand the "scary" world of electricity.

The "story" stuff has never gone away, and I decided to explain what I see has gone on in our country with a couple of them.

In my television career, the best I managed to achieve was to be a "senior middle management executive," whatever that means. As a rule, I had direct reporting responsibility to senior management. If this management decided that I was not getting the job done -- right or wrong -- I would have been sent away to find another job. Similarly, when my senior management was not getting the job done, the owners of the company would -- or at least consider -- throwing the inadequate management out, unless the management could find some senior executive like me to blame and throw out, and maintain that they had fixed the problem. For senior corporate executives, it is prudent to set someone up to take the fall if you yourself were being threatened.

It is amazing to me that our president and his administration have chosen a different management attitude. Effectively, they say to the owners of the enterprise, (the citizens of our country), "We will continue to do what we are doing with the people who are doing it, and we are doing a great job. We will not leave Iraq until the job is done."

I would have no expectation that everything the administration does would be perfect, yet I would expect that from time to time, when something big goes wrong, (like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) that they would say or do something to acknowledge that everything Is NOT coming up roses.

It is time to state the obvious and blame things on the people who are responsible for our being where we are. They all represent mismanagement and many senior people should have been replaced.

Here are just a few minor management mistakes that have been made by the administration in the War:

We failed to enlist full international cooperation before launching the War in Iraq.
We demobilized the Iraqi Army.
We did not properly equip our troops.
We did not listen to the Generals who wanted more troops.
We did not follow our own plans for a post war Iraq.
We did not listen to dissenting opinions concerning WMDs.
We demeaned "nation-building" and then we promoted "nation-building."
We predicted that our troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.
We predicted that Iraq would pay for its own reconstruction.
We underestimated the cost of the war.
We failed to give the weapons inspectors enough time.
We relied on Ahmed Chalabi to give us accurate intelligence.
We announced that major combat operations in Iraq had ended well over three years ago.
We announced " Mission Accomplished" well over three years ago.
We hired Halliburton to do so many things, and look at what happened.
We shut down an Iraqi newspaper.

On to another "story".

When David Begelman was fired from his job as president of MGM I thought that he should not have been fired. One day when we were discussing this, he said to me that he had produced a series of failed movies and deserved to be fired. David was a professional and was prepared to fall on his sword by accepting responsibility for his failures.

My friend Reese Schoenfeld, the founding president of CNN said to me today "It's time to get down. In fact, it's impossible not to be down. By now it is clear that Iraq is a war of deceit and defeat. It is equally clear that our political choice is between the incompetent and the impotent. Superpowers should be defined as having nuclear capability, energy surplus and a sound currency. We no longer qualify."

What else is there to say?