I was thinking about two former American government employees this weekend, and how the differences between them tell us a lot about why the United States is in so much trouble today.
 
The first person is Eugene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director immortalized in the film Apollo 13. I watched a rerun of the film on Friday night, and was struck again by his remarkable leadership of the team that improvised the astronauts’ rescue after an in-flight explosion crippled their spacecraft and placed their lives in peril. Many readers probably remember the moment in the film when Kranz tells his colleagues: “Failure is not an option.” This line may have been apocryphal, but when I survey the landscape of problems we face at home and abroad, I wish we had more people like Kranz in key leadership positions.

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Yes I know, it’s just a movie, but Ed Harris’s portrayal is consistent with what we know about Kranz himself. Above all, Kranz was a leader who took full responsibility for his actions. Here’s what he told his colleagues after the tragic fire on the launching pad of Apollo 1, a fire that killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we… Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’…We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. … From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do…Competent means we will never take anything for granted…When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

That is the kind of attitude that lands men on the moon, builds a healthy economy, and when necessary, wins wars.

Now compare that frank and honest statement with the behavior of another former government employee: Richard Perle. In a recent article in The National Interest and a public appearance at the Nixon Center, Perle has tried to sell the story that neither he nor his fellow neoconservatives had any significant influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and especially the decision to invade Iraq. Specifically, he denounces the supposedly “false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative ‘ideologues.'” He suggests that no one has ever documented this claim, either conveniently ignoring the many books and articles that did exactly that, or misrepresenting what these works actually say.

Given that Iraq turned into a debacle that the United States is having trouble escaping, it is hardly surprising that Perle is denying his role now. But that’s not what he said back when the war looked more promising. In an interview with journalist George Packer, recounted in the latter’s book The Assassins’ Gate, Perle described the key role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq War happen. 

If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it.”

The “people who wound up in important positions” were key neoconservatives like Douglas Feith, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others, who had been openly calling for regime change in Iraq since the late 1990s and who used their positions in the Bush administration to make the case for war after 9/11, aided by a chorus of sympathetic pundits at places like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Weekly Standard. The neocons were hardly some secret cabal or conspiracy, as they were making their case loudly and in public, and no serious scholar claims that they “bamboozled” Bush and Cheney into a war. Rather, numerous accounts have documented that they had been openly pushing for war since 1998 and they continued to do so after 9/11. As neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan later admitted, he and his fellow neoconservatives were successful in part because they had a “ready-made approach to the world” that seemed to provide an answer to the challenges the U.S. faced after 9/11.

The bottom line is simple: Richard Perle is lying. What is disturbing about this case is is not that a former official is trying to falsify the record in such a brazen fashion; Perle is hardly the first policymaker to kick up dust about his record and he certainly won’t be the last. The real cause for concern is that there are hardly any consequences for the critical role that Perle and the neoconservatives played for their pivotal role in causing one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history. If somebody can help engineer a foolish war and remain a respected Washington insider — as is the case with Perle — what harm is likely to befall them if they lie about it later?

Let’s keep a few facts in mind. Perle and his neoconservative buddies helped develop and sell a policy that has left over 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 30,000 wounded, was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and will end up costing the United States more than a trillion dollars. Yet instead of having the integrity and courage to acknowlege his role and admit his mistakes — as an honest man like Gene Kranz would — Perle now offers us a squid’s ink cloud of lies and prevarications. Although his absurd claims have been promptly and properly challenged, does anyone seriously think he will pay a larger price? The National Interest was all-too-willing to publish his rewriting of the historical record, and no doubt prestigious organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will be happy to give him a platform at future meetings. Look for him on the Lehrer Newshour and CNN too; heck, he could even end up with his own show on Fox News.

Let’s face it: there is little or no accountability in Washington, where being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry; indeed, you don’t even have to admit responsibility for past mistakes, no matter how serious. It’s just the American taxpayer who ends up footing the bill, along with the soldiers who fought and died for these blunders.

As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes — until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle — we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust.

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With apologies to my associates here at FP, I find myself in some disagreement with the packaging of the current issue, and especially the special section on the “Axis of Upheaval.”

The “axis of evil” was an unfortunate catch-phrase dreamed up in 2002 to scare the American people into supporting a foolish war. Its fatal flaw was the implication three very different regimes — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — were somehow in cahoots and should be dealt with in a similar fashion. The result, as readers have surely noticed, was failure on all three fronts.

A term like “axis of upheaval” is likely to mislead us in much the same way. It suggests that there is a high degree of connection, congruence, or coordination between a set of regrettable but largely unrelated problems. Grouping these diverse situations under a single rubric makes them all sound scarier, but that’s not a smart move when they are in fact of widely varying importance. Lumping them under one heading is a sort of glib mental shorthand that makes it harder to identify which problems must be addressed quickly, which can be put off, and which should be ignored.

For the world’s major powers — and especially the United States — the central strategic challenge today is figuring out how to allocate finite economic, military, and political resources. Great power rivalries are presently muted, so the big decisions involve minor powers like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, or unstable trouble spots like Pakistan, Somalia or Darfur. In each case, the same question recurs: should we intervene or should we stay out? Making the right call requires focusing on the particular circumstances of each case and the extent to which it actually threatens vital interests. When action is deemed necessary, we also need a strategy that is appropriate for the specific problem at hand. Russia’s situation bears little resemblance to the state of anarchy in Somalia, the drug war in Mexico or the crisis in Gaza, and we are more likely to judge each problem correctly and fashion a smart response if we resist the temptation to see them as part of some broader global trend.

In his introduction, Niall Ferguson suggests that these current troubles share the same features that ignited World War II: ethnic distintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline. This claim makes the situation sound alarming, but the good news is that an even more important ingredient is missing. Today, there are no territorially expansionist and highly risk-acceptant great powers like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, countries that combined significant military power with deeply revisionist ambitions. Ironically, the main revisionist power in recent years has been the United States, which spent the past 15 years expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and then tried to “transform” the Middle East and Persian Gulf by force. Yet even George W. Bush didn’t seek to redraw borders the way that Hitler or Tojo did. For the foreseeable future, the danger of a global conflagration is minimal.

Even if today’s instabilities are exacerbated by ethnic competition, financial turmoil and other background conditions, there’s nothing especially novel about the phenomenon of “upheaval.” During the 1950s, there were coup d’etats, revolutions, or civil wars in Iran, Korea, Guatemala, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hungary (to name but a few), and subsequent decades witnessed mass killings in Indonesia and Cambodia, revolutions in Libya, Iran and Nicaragua, a “dirty war” in Argentina, a genocide in Rwanda/Burundi, Zimbabwe’s descent into turmoil, and protracted conflicts in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, El Salvador and many other countries. Yet as the Human Security Report Project (and several other studies) have shown, the overall level of global violence is significantly lower today than it has been for most of the past century.

It is also worth remembering that outside powers have at best a mixed record at managing upheavals outside their own borders. Foreign intervention in the French revolution helped trigger two decades of great power war, and Western efforts to suppress the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 backfired too. As Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece on Somalia shows, U.S. interference there has repeatedly made a bad situation worse, because U.S. leaders simply didn’t know what they were doing. Nor should we forget that the complex problems we now face in Central Asia are partly the product of centuries of imperial meddling, a legacy that also complicates the West’s relationship with much of the Middle East. It is hard to believe that more meddling now is going to make things significantly better. The spread of nationalism and the persistence of other forms of local identity eventually destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British, and French empires, and those same forces will confound outsiders’ attempts to impose order on those unhappy societies where instability is now rife.

This is not to say that the international community should simply ignore these various problems or believe that they can always wall them off. But the right course of action is to evaluate each case separately, both to figure out how serious a threat it poses and to fashion a response that has some chance of working. Above all, we need to take a calm and cool-eyed approach to these challenges, so that we focus on the threats that matter most and on the cases where we have a clear strategy for success. Somalia may be the “most dangerous place in the world” to visit, but that doesn’t mean it poses the greatest danger to the rest of the world. A phrase like “axis of upheaval” may help sell magazines and give commentators something to talk about, but it is more of an obstacle to our understanding than an aid to it.

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