The Bad CEO
Theory Is Proven

Posted 11:53 p.m., May 6, 2004

by Kevin Featherly

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The president has proven what was suspected; he is the quintessentially weak CEO.

The president's decision, announced this afternoon, to stick with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be a winner, at least within the very narrow strictures of electoral politics. To those favorably predisposed to the president, it demonstrates that he once again appears loyal, resolute, unyielding to the pressures of all those bad liberals-you know, the ones in the media.

But the reality is that this non-move move proves the magnitude of Bush's prime weakness as skipper of the nation--he refuses to change tack, even when the wind is blowing so fiercely in the wrong direction that the vessel is in danger of capsizing.

So Sorry

Perhaps this falls into the "too little, too late" category, but to his credit today Bush used a Rose Garden photo-op with Jordan's King Abdullah II to apologize for "the images of cruelty and humiliation" emanating out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The late coming apology followed several appearances on Arab TV Wednesday that fell well short of their intended purpose--mitigating Arab rage over those hideous images of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib prison.

New pictures, published today in the Washington Post -- one depicting a female soldier appearing to drag a naked prisoner on a leash -- only serve to justify that description. Another showed a picture that appeared to verge on actual torture, not just sexual humiliation. In that photo, a nude prisoner is shown handcuffed to a bunk, his arms stretched behind far him, his back radically arched. A pair of women's underwear is stretched over his face.

"I told [Abdullah] I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that the people that have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America. I assured him that Americans like me didn't appreciate what we saw."

-- President George W. Bush

It is odd that Bush apologized to Abdullah and not to the "Arab street" when he had the chance, during the Arab TV interviews, but the president seemed gripped by genuine emotional and contrition. Still, undoubtedly many in the Arab world will cynically view it as an effort to repair and maintain what now is a precious--because altogether rare--Arab-American alliance.

The president also insisted today "the wrong-doers" of Abu Ghraib "will be brought to justice."

Rummyâ??s Flush

However, it appears that those "wrong-doers" are at the small end of the military chain of command. Whatever heads do roll, Rumsfeld's apparently will not be among them, despite what has been described as the defense secretary's failure to appraise the president of the existence of digital images that have ignited a potentially fatal backlash against U.S. efforts in Iraq.

At this point, even if it represents a personal affront to a key administration ally, even if it is an actual injustice, it would be expedient to remove the blustering and dismissive Rumsfeld, signaling to the world that the president finally "gets it" and is prepared to change tactics in Iraq, to begin dealing in a more cooperative, magnanimous and conciliatory way with the troubled Iraqi people. (People who, according to a Christian Science Monitor stringer in Baghdad who was interviewed on the radio yesterday, are faced with ever-worsening living conditions, and that's not to mention all those things that have a tendency, literally, to blow up in their faces.)

Before the Rose Garden photo-op, the smart money was on Rumsfeld's ouster. The great Atlantic Monthly writer James Fallows appeared on the Al Franken radio show today, only moments before the president took his Rumsfeld-or-bust stand. Fallows was sure that Rumsfeld was on his way out the door.

"This will be a really interesting test of two values that are very, very important in the Bush administration. One is, you know, never changing course, or at least never admitting that you're changing course even though in the last two or three month all sorts of things have changed in Iraq. ...

"On the other hand, there is the desire to stay in office. And that may come to a conflict in the person of Donald Rumsfeld."

"...This is a guy who, I think, if you met him in normal life, you'd actually enjoy having a beer with. He has the devil-may-care attitude that comes from 'Top Gun' or whatever. He basically doesn't think he has to mess around with the weenies. If they don't like they can lump it.

"But there is that transition of being that way in a bar and being that way as the Secretary of Defense during a war. ... It's kind of charming in human terms ... [but] it's perhaps not the right personality match for this kind of challenge.

"... The administration, in various ways, has been positioning itself to actually change entirely the Iraq policy without saying so. Now there are going to be a lot more troops there. Now they're trying to bring back some of the [Iraqi] army, to bring back some of the Baathists.

â??So, in a way, [firing Rumsfeld] would give them the cover for something they need to do, say, 'Well it's a new day today, that bad old Rumsfeld is gone and mistakes were made, but it's a new tomorrow, so we're staying on course.

"It could be a help for the administration, and also for the country."

-- James Fallows

Sorry, Jim. Not gonna happen.

What Did The President Know?

Rumsfeld's ouster could be easily justified by a president who made a point of talking to reporters Wednesday to inform them he had personally scolded Rumsfeld for failing to alert him about the situation in Abu Ghraib. But there is some question about whether the president was actually in the dark on that matterâ??raising for me the prospect that Bush would rather keep Rumsfeld around than unleash another potential Paul Oâ??Neill on the book-publishing world.

Why would I say that? Well, this exchange took place between anchor Bill Hemmer and White House correspondent Dana Bash early this morning on CNN:

HEMMER: "Dana, get back to that point about when the president knew about this. We're told [the incidents] happened last fall, the abuse anyway happened last fall. The investigation starts in January. The report's done the end of March, first part of April. But the White House is saying the president knew nothing until 60 Minutes II broadcast these stories?"

BASH: "What they're saying is that he knew nothing of the photographs of these abuses. But the question of when he knew about the abuses at all, that is something that the White House really can't answer, Bill. We were told earlier in the week that perhaps he was told after the U.S. Central Command put out a notice in mid-January about these apparent abuses. At this point they are saying they can't nail down a date when he was told by the Defense Secretary or by anybody at the Pentagon about when these abuses even existed.

"The other interesting point here is that the White House is saying that the president knew nothing about a report, a classified report cataloguing these abuses. That was done in early March. He didn't know about that either, until it came out in March."

The reporting of David Martin, the Pentagon correspondent for CBS-TV, was particularly compelling--and distressing--on Wednesday. He pointed out that Gen. Jeffrey Miller, the new commander of prisons in Iraq (who moved over after heading up the terrorist prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) inspected Abu Ghraib last September. At that point, Miller recommended that "the military police be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees."

"[Those are] words that sound very much like what the MPs are now claiming: They were ordered to soften up prisoners for interrogation."

-- David Martin, CBS News

Martin also reported that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of occupation forces in Iraq, issued a directive saying that MPs at Abu Ghraib should take their orders directly from the interrogators. A handwritten note from one of the MPs says that Sanchez "has witnessed how the prisoners are handled, such as handcuffed with no clothes."

Did Rumsfeld know any of this? He might have been able to find out, when he was briefed--on site--by the military head of Abu Ghraib last September.

Peace Without Dignity?

This situation is so bad that the "P" word (pullout) is starting to get discussed by some rather smart people.

"We have to find a way out. This is no longer a war America can end. It's only a war that America can leave."

-- James Zogby, president, Arab American Institute

*** "This policy has to be changed. We cannot prevail in this war with the policy that's going today. We either have to mobilize, or we have to get out."

-- Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.)

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"We will not succeed in making [Iraq] a pro-U.S., liberal system. And we will continue to have an expansion of violence there. The country may break up into three parts, and eventually we will probably be driven out. And also, just from a practical point of view, I don't think we have the Army ground forces adequate to hold that beyond another six months or nine months. ...

"The forces that have been rotated in and out are going back there now. We have four-plus divisions committed there. The ones that have just been extended for 90 days have been there a full year. In World War II, we generally considered people involved in combat to be combat-fatigued and not useful after 180 days.

"We've had some of our troops out there doing guard duty and pulling patrols, facing the same kind of risks that soldiers face in combat everywhere for over 365 days--we're now sending them back for 90 days. How long can we do that with the same forces?"

"...I think the country now, Iraq now, is probably going to be available for al Queda, it was not before. And so we've improved the position for terrorists in the world, and we haven't achieved what we set out to achieve in Iraq. And I don't see any prospects for it."

-- Lt. Gen. William Odom (retired), former National Security Administration director

There are those who defend the administration, naturally. Then there are those, Rush Limbaugh chief among them, who manage even to justify the behavior of the prison guards who forced male prisoners to get undressed, masturbate themselves and pile up atop each other nude, to humiliate themselves in front of women, presumably violating their religion, all on camera.

What's different between that, Limbaugh says, and what initiates of the Skull and Bones society--George Bush's old college club--go through all the time? Why, it was just a bit of playful hazing. A bit of steam, rapturously blown off.

"If I had somebody in a prison try to kill members of my nation, I might enjoy taunting them a little bit. I don't know, I might."

-- Rush Limbaugh

I've been walking around for days now feeling like there's a hole in my gut. Is it any wonder?

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