Sunday, November 21, 2004
Spies and Diplomats, Stop Whining And Do Your Jobs
Now is the time for these public servants to return to doing the jobs the public pays them to do. The intelligence agencies must find better ways to ferret out useful information and supply it to the White House – whose occupant has been re-elected by a majority of Americans.
Diplomats need to implement and defend the policies of the President they serve – whether or not they voted for that President.
Clif May: These professionals should be encouraged to advise, question and offer alternative approaches. But when the President says, “Here's what I've decided,” the only responses are “Yes sir,” or “I quit.”
The CIA failed to track Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction – weapons he once had but, apparently, destroyed secretly at some point before the American-led invasion in 2003.
That's only a fraction of what the CIA didn't accomplish. Yet the organization had plenty of time this year to leak information intended to damage President Bush's re-election chances.
The CIA is supposed to provide intelligence to policy makers. The CIA is not supposed to make policy for policy makers, nor tell the President how they think he should do his job.
Meanwhile, over at Foggy Bottom, Condoleeza Rice also has her work cut out for her.
The career employees at the State Department and in the Foreign Service are mostly liberal Democrats who have been as susceptible as other readers of the New York Review of Books to the widening of the ideological and partisan divides.
Others referred to Bush and his foreign policy team as “the Christmas help,” meaning they were confident this President would soon be gone and then they'd be able to get back to business as usual.
The few Bush loyalists – and those who don't believe they're entitled to veto the decisions of a sitting President -- were referred to as “the American interests section.”
Can such a state of affairs continue? Unfortunately, it can. But it shouldn't, certainly not now, in this critical era.
It is the task of Porter Goss and Condi Rice to communicate this dramatically changed reality to the people who work for them. Doing so, won't make them popular. But they owe it to this President – and to future presidents as well.
Now is the time for these public servants to return to doing the jobs the public pays them to do. The intelligence agencies must find better ways to ferret out useful information and supply it to the White House – whose occupant has been re-elected by a majority of Americans.
Diplomats need to implement and defend the policies of the President they serve – whether or not they voted for that President.
Clif May: These professionals should be encouraged to advise, question and offer alternative approaches. But when the President says, “Here's what I've decided,” the only responses are “Yes sir,” or “I quit.”
The CIA failed to track Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction – weapons he once had but, apparently, destroyed secretly at some point before the American-led invasion in 2003.
That's only a fraction of what the CIA didn't accomplish. Yet the organization had plenty of time this year to leak information intended to damage President Bush's re-election chances.
The CIA is supposed to provide intelligence to policy makers. The CIA is not supposed to make policy for policy makers, nor tell the President how they think he should do his job.
Meanwhile, over at Foggy Bottom, Condoleeza Rice also has her work cut out for her.
The career employees at the State Department and in the Foreign Service are mostly liberal Democrats who have been as susceptible as other readers of the New York Review of Books to the widening of the ideological and partisan divides.
Others referred to Bush and his foreign policy team as “the Christmas help,” meaning they were confident this President would soon be gone and then they'd be able to get back to business as usual.
The few Bush loyalists – and those who don't believe they're entitled to veto the decisions of a sitting President -- were referred to as “the American interests section.”
Can such a state of affairs continue? Unfortunately, it can. But it shouldn't, certainly not now, in this critical era.
It is the task of Porter Goss and Condi Rice to communicate this dramatically changed reality to the people who work for them. Doing so, won't make them popular. But they owe it to this President – and to future presidents as well.
