Tuesday, April 03, 2007

“The Advisors The President Wants.”

After President Bush won his second term in 2004, he nominated his friend and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to head the Justice Department.  As someone who was (and still is) appalled by the torture memos and the mere existence of supposedly extraterritorial prisons like Guantanamo, I thought that Mr. Gonzales needed to be rejected, and so I wrote my Senator.  From prior experience with writing Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colorado), I knew that I’d get nowhere with him, but since I’d voted for Colorado’s junior Democratic senator, Ken Salazar, I thought I’d get a better response from him.

Alas, it was not to be.  Sen. Salazar and/or his staff took umbrage at my stating outright that a vote for Gonzales would make Sen. Salazar, and through him myself and the rest of the citizens of Colorado, culpable for the torture of prisoners, the extraordinary renditions of innocent Muslims to countries that practice torture, and the creation of secret and extraterritorial prisons that were, according to Mr. Gonzales’ own memos, extralegal and so beyond the reach of both U.S. and international law.  My letter remains an excellent example of now NOT to win friends and influence people.

In the tersely worded response to my own letter, I was informed directly that Sen. Salazar believed that Presidents deserved to have the advisors they wanted.  This same opinion has been made with regard to several of the President’s judicial nominees and a few miscellaneous nominees for appointed posts within the Administration.

Generally speaking, I agree with Sen. Salazar’s opinion on this issue.  However, there is one very large caveat I must add:  Presidents deserve to get the advisors they want – so long as the advisors are qualified to do the jobs they’ve been nominated for.  Unfortunately in the case of far too many of President Bush’s advisors, they simply lack(ed) the qualifications.  These qualifications include, using Mr. Gonzales as a convenient example, knowledge of the law, interpersonal skills, and management skills, in addition to something I’ll call the ability to comprehend the difference between the spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law (in other words, an accurate moral/ethical compass).  Mr. Gonzales certainly had the knowledge of the law and, depending on whom you ask, some amount of interpersonal skill.  However, from what I’ve read he definitely lacks managerial skills and, in my not even remotely humble opinion, he is sorely lacking in the ability to follow the spirit of the law.  Hell, when it comes to issues of international law and the United States’ international treaty obligations, Mr. Gonzales even has a difficult time sticking to the letter of the law.

Mr. Gonzales wasn’t the only political appointee in the Bush Administration who lacked the qualifications to do his job.  Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to be sufficiently skilled – until he was charged with running a real war.  Reforming the military is all well and good, but if you’re going to ignore the best advice of people who actually know what war is (people like former General Shinseki, who was all but escorted out of the Army after saying that it would take half a million soldiers to effectively police Iraq after the invasion), you don’t deserve the position of Secretary of Defense.  Another individual who obviously didn’t qualify for his position is former Director of the CIA (DCIA) Porter Goss, a career politician who replaced the career CIA bureaucrats with his (generally useless) political staffers.  Goss was put into the DCIA position to shake up the CIA after 9/11, and he certainly succeeded.  I’ve seen some articles that quote anonymous sources inside the CIA as saying it will take a decade to repair the damage that Goss did to the CIA.  Lovely.

(Given the usually-justified derision I’ve held for bureaucracy over the years, I’m continually amazed to find myself defending career bureaucrats as I get older.  But career bureaucrats actually know how to do their jobs and have been doing their jobs for years or decades.  Political appointees come and go every 4 years or so and generally have no clue what is actually necessary to run an organization like the CIA, the military, or NOAA.  It’s past time that career bureaucrats had a champion, so I guess I’ll take up that particular mantle, at least until someone better qualified comes along.)

There’s something to be said for giving President Bush enough rope (in the form of unqualified advisors) to hang himself with.  Unfortunately, it’s my opinion that some things are beyond partisanship, and the welfare of the country is one of those things.  If an advisor is going to result in the United States getting a black eye or eight, then that advisor should be rejected by the Senate.  Donald Rumsfeld might have been fine as a peacetime Secretary of Defense, but the Senate that approved him should never have assumed that we’d be at peace the entire tenure of President Bush’s presidency – no Senate should EVER make this kind of assumption regarding any president’s tenure.  The approval of Alberto Gonzales should have been rejected outright because of the impact his torture memos would have on the international relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world – he was obviously damaged goods.  And now we’re being subject to the fallout from Gonzales’ inadequacies with regard to the firings of U.S. Attorneys.

Perhaps Sen. Salazar and I could agree on the following statement instead:  “Every president deserves to have the advisors they need.” The welfare of the United States is not something to play politics with.

[Crossposted to The 5th Estate]