Bush: On Toward Untoward Leadership
Fred Fiedler & Martin Chemers, in Improving Leadership Effectiveness, declared that “The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization.”
As an example of the validity of this statement, we will avoid the most recent achievement of our proposed paragon in order to focus on the more important point introduced by this quote which his past success raises:
When [U.S. attorney Patrick] Fitzgerald went to Kenya in 1998 to investigate the bombing of the U.S. Embassy there, he and his team decided to follow both American and Kenyan law until they decided which country they would file charges in. “If there were two ways of doing it, we would do it the harder way so it would stand up in court in either place,” he said.
That meant that instead of letting a witness sit behind a one-way mirror and point out a suspect from a lineup of six people, as U.S. law requires, witnesses had to come face-to-face with a lineup of nine people, then walk up and place their hand on the shoulder of the suspect they identified, as required under Kenyan law.
Kenya does not guarantee suspects the right to an attorney, and the New York judge who tried the case was not satisfied Fitzgerald’s team had satisfied their obligation under American law to educate the suspect of his right to an attorney and so dismissed some parts of the man’s confession.
But both suspects were convicted anyway.
Considering that the field of international criminal prosecution was still very new when this case was tried, this result was far more than anyone should have expected. In addition, it’s magnitudes of scale larger than all of the leadership “accomplishments” of George W. Bush in his entire life.
Bush’s shortcomings could have been avoided if he had heeded the advice of someone who had learned that hard lesson himself:
Leadership in today’s world requires far more
than a large stock of gunboats
and a hard fist at the conference table.
- Hubert H. Humphrey
Associated Press Writer Anne Flaherty explains:
Four years into the Iraq war, about the only thing that has not changed is President Bush’s insistence the fight can be won. His Jan. 10 announcement that he planned to send in 21,500 more combat troops found support among most Republicans.
However, all is not well with this “stay the mental course” practice, as the late Winston Churchill understood:
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers
which they dare not dismount.
And the tigers are getting hungry.
Our current-day assessment of the tiger ride?
[H]ow much longer the president can hold out is uncertain. [E]ven [Republicans] say the clock is ticking.
Leadership is practiced not so much in words
as in attitude and in actions.
- Harold Geneen
Now would be a good time for a true leader to prove his mettle, but instead of leading, The Deciderer hides behind his defenders:
Management is doing things right;
leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter F. Drucker
The testimony of Valerie Plame destroyed some of the long-standing myths about her outing as a covert CIA officer that have been circulated for more than three years by George W. Bush’s apologists, including Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.
A friend of mine characterizes leaders simply like this:
“Leaders don’t inflict pain. They bear pain.”
- Max DePree
Indeed, Hiatt and his editorial page cohorts have made trashing Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and mocking the seriousness of Plame’s exposure almost a regular feature, recycling many long-discredited White House talking points, including an attempt to question whether Plame was in fact “covert.”
In war, three quarters [of the victory]
turns on personal character and relations;
the balance of manpower and materials
counts only for the remaining quarter.
- Napoleon I
After the March 16 hearing before Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight Committee, those pro-Bush falsehoods stand in even starker disrepute – as should the reputation of the Post’s editorial page, which has never quite reconciled itself to how thoroughly it fell for Bush’s Iraq War deceptions.
Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man’s character,
give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
Based on testimony before Waxman’s committee, it also now is clear that while the Post was busy defending the Bush administration on the Plame affair, the White House was conducting a systematic cover-up of its role in the leak.
A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops,
while on the contrary an incapable leader
can demoralize the best of troops.
- General of the Armies John J. Pershing
Though Bush declared in September 2003 that he was determined to get to the bottom of who blew Plame’s cover, it was revealed at the March 16 hearing that the White House never even undertook an administrative review to assess responsibility for the leak.
James Knodell, the hapless director of the White House security office, was forced to concede that no internal security investigation was performed; no security clearances were suspended or revoked; no punishment of any kind was meted out to White House political adviser Karl Rove who is now known to have revealed Plame’s classified identity to at least two reporters.
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss….
The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Knodell, whose job includes assessing Executive Branch security breaches, said that what he knew about the Plame case was “through the press.”
A new leader has to be able to change an organization
that is dreamless, soulless and visionless …
someone’s got to make a wake up call.
- Warren Bennis
In a normal world, a newspaper would praise Joe Wilson for his dedication and patriotism – both for undertaking the CIA mission and blowing the whistle on the President’s abuse of intelligence to lead the nation to war. A newspaper also might be expected to demand stern accountability from the Bush administration for not only damaging national security by exposing Valerie Plame’s identity but for then misleading the public and mounting a cover-up of the facts.
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters
cannot be trusted with the important matters.
- Albert Einstein
But the Post editorial board can’t seem to get past its own gullibility in buying into the administration’s bogus WMD claims in 2002-03. Rather than apologize for enabling Bush and Cheney to lead the nation into a disastrous war, Hiatt and his boss, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham, apparently think they can ignore their responsibility to the readers and to the nation.
And when we think we lead,
we are most led.
- Lord Byron
This is what the Washington Post offers in the way of journalistic leadership - more of the same:
It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had “lied the nation into war,” as is frequently charged. The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed — as did the CIA — the catastrophically wrong case that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the United Nations.
The easy way out is to blame President Bush, Vice President Cheney or former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld… Having rolled the dice on what everyone understood to be an enormous gamble, Mr. Bush and his team followed up with breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance. But the war might have spun out of control even under wiser leadership.
Wiser leadership would have known better:
Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why
good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.
- Lester R. Bittel The Nine Master Keys of Management
Borrowing heavily from A. Alexander of Progressive Daily Beacon, I thought I might point out that the behaviors of George W. Bush do not constitute leadership:
Leadership isn’t about one person perceiving themselves as being “superior” to others and bullying them into doing what the so-called leader says they should. Real leadership is the ability of one person to instill in others a desire of wanting to follow their lead. Above all else, real leadership unites…it never divides.
Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides.
It must bring sides together.
- Jesse Jackson
George W. Bush has held the bully pulpit for more than six years. He controlled the world’s loudest megaphone and all he’s managed to do with it is make himself and the United States reviled, despised, and a laughing stock. The President has done more to instill hatred toward the United States, than anyone could have ever imagined possible.
George W. Bush has divided nation against nation and American against American … [Y]es, leadership matters!
We must become the change we want to see.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Believe it or not, there really is some good news to conclude this post. The House Democrats actually managed to win a vote intended to produce legislative limits on Owwer Leedur and his bloody wars:
House Democrats won their first vote on a war spending bill that would demand the president pull troops out of Iraq before September 2008.
It’s about time! The people already spoke on this topic - loudly - last fall. As Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin might have observed of the Democrats:
Ah well! I am their leader,
I really ought to follow them!