BUSH'S WAR -- CORPOCRACY STRIPPED NAKED!

BUSH’S WAR – CORPOCRACY STRIPPED NAKED!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 26, 2008

“Being a confidante of a CEO is not the same thing as being the CEO’s organization development (OD) adviser and consultant. Confusing the two roles is a certain route to disaster. One calls for improving the spirit of the CEO to face the day; the other calls for spoiling it by confronting him (or her) with news the CEO would rather not hear; exposing him (or her) to ideas he (or she) would rather not think about much less face, while presenting irrefutable evidence that certain decisions must be made now, decisions the CEO would prefer to table for another time.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Leaderless Leadership in the Twenty-first Century


I PRESIDENT BUSH’S ADMINISTRATION: IN SEARCH OF AN IDEA

In case you missed it, I would urge you to watch the PBS television rendition of “Bush’s War” when it is rebroadcast. Recently (March 24 – 25, 2008), I watched this program suspended between disbelief and horror. No presidency has failed so gloriously upward as this administration over the past seven and one-quarter years. The Bush Administration, as a consequence, has been stripped naked for all to see the folly of man.

The “Bush’s War” is a four and one-half hour presentation over these two nights, which takes us to the present. It distills 40 hours of taping, hundreds of interviews and other sources to create this snapshot of Bush’s War.

For the last score of years, I have been pointing out the disintegration of American leadership in all phases of American life. My interest is not academic or intellectual, but that of a pedestrian scholar viewing the deconstruction as if a sidewalk superintendent watching an edifice tumble to dust before my very eyes.

This has been the equivalent of a reverse moral metamorphoses signaling the collapse from high moral purpose, duty and honor to cynicism, hubris and uncharacteristic hegemony.

It would seem that the Bush Administration in search of an idea has settled on the bellicose policy of “preemption” to be its legacy. This has been a reverse moral metamorphoses free of ideology, free of realism, and even free of a clear defense of freedom. It appears to be predominantly emotional and irrational based on old histories and grudges with a passion to win, to stick it to an old enemy left off the hook, Iraq.

It is no accident that neo conservatives behind this charge into the blind were schooled in corporate America.

The “war on terror” was first launched against the perpetrators of 9/11 trained in Afghanistan, but neo conservatives bristled to widen the war to a larger target, Iraq. President Bush the Elder left Iraq as unfinished business, which president Bush the Younger was determined to finish.

It made no sense from the first, as leadership never does when the heart leads the head. There was no selective service draft, only a relatively small volunteer army, quite inadequate for a major war.

Once again, the National Guard was being asked to take up the slack as it did so well in Bosnia, leaving the nation with inadequate reserve support for national disasters, as Katrina proved. President Bush the Younger insisted he was not supportive of a nation building strategy, but found to his embarrassment that he had backed into this conundrum. It was the old corporate game of “ready, fire, aim!”

What PBS’s “Bush’s War” shows so dramatically is the divisiveness between the State Department headed by Colin Powell and the Department of Defense headed by Vice President Chaney’s old pal, Donald Rumsfeld.

One looks at this snapshot of Bush’s War and remembers his own corporate days like déjà vu. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cuts off the input of think tanks and state department experts on Iraq and the Middle East in favor of his like-minded cronies in the Department of Defense. It is the old corporate saw of “divide & conquer,” and then decide, “what is so,” even if it is not, and then feverishly collect evidence of dubious content and suspect sources to solidify one’s position.

II ORGANIZATION DESIGNED AGAINST ITSELF

Every corporation has ass kisser, and bullies. In most cases, despite their countervailing presence, business gets done. When the bully is the chief honcho and bullying is his preferred arsenal of attack, taking no enemies, it is the making of catastrophe from the beginning.

The reason for going to war with Iraq was ostensibly because Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). The CIA was unable to uncover conclusive evidence of such weapons, and CIA director Tenner told the president so. Chaney and Rumsfeld then badgered the CIA to come up with a “white paper” that suggested otherwise. They eventually complied, applying incredible pressure on the CIA director and his people to be complicit in this charade. When the final “white paper” on evidence of WMDs was presented to President Bush, he said, “Is this all you’ve got?”

It was then, at this point, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as OD consultant to the president, should have said to the CIA director, “Go back and make the case for war or not.” But she was the president’s pal, a confidante and friend, and remained silent. CIA director Tenner, who had been harassed into submission by Chaney and Rumsfeld, told the president it was a “slam dunk.” It was in this theatre of the absurd that the go-cart of war was pushed down the hill into the eventual abyss.

In the middle of this theatre of the absurd, the generals were saying that 400,000 troops would be needed, while Rumsfeld suggested 70,000 would be adequate. He compromised eventually on 120,000. The generals also said that the hard part would be the occupation and dealing with the ethnic tensions that already existed in a population of nearly 30 million with three powerful cultural tribes. Rumsfeld soft-pedaled this. He became a television fixture in a culture that loves its soap opera icons that titillate their fancies with swashbuckling bravado of the United States strutting its stuff as the “lone superpower.”

None of this is real to 99 percent of a nation not asked to make any sacrifices, but very real to the families of the men and women of the 1 percent fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the early low points of this tragic-comedy was the appearance of the Secretary of State, not the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, presenting the case for going to war with Iraq with CIA Director Tenner sitting behind him. The Neocons had successfully created a full-court fiction of WMDs, while two otherwise honorable and long serving patriotic Americans were made history’s stooges in this psychodrama.

Former national security adviser to President Bush the Elder, Brent Scowcroft, sponsor and mentor to Condoleezza Rice, wrote an Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Attack Saddam.” He warned in the piece that invading Iraq would lead to a long, bloody, and costly occupation, while diverting the US from the war on terror, which was then concentrated on Afghanistan. Rice and President Bush were furious. They felt betrayed. This was not however true of his father who received an advance copy of the article and gave it his tacit approval.

President Bush the Younger won the 2001 election by the fabled record of the Florida ballot. After graduating from Yale, he was like a prodigal son who rejected the comfort and affluence of his family and sought his fortune on his own prospecting for oil, and eventually striking it rich. He rejoined the family on his own terms demonstrating a high risk, decisive and entrepreneurial spirit. Prior to being president, he showed little interest in foreign affairs or intellectual pursuits, preferring straight talking men-of-action, men who never second-guessed themselves. What he did as president is common in corpocracy, that is, he surrounded himself with like thinking, acting and feeling individuals. The consequences of this inclination are to magnify personal strengths while compounding personal weaknesses. Leadership, unfortunately, is not a zero sum game.

III WHEN LEADERSHIP WAS NOT CONFUSED WITH GENERALSHIP

The dominant components of leadership are strategic vision along with a clear understanding on the ground, that is, where you are, where you want to go, and what the requirements are to get there. Historian David McCullough, author of “1776” (2007) claims George Washington, our first president, was a great leader, but not a great Revolutionary War general. Nathaniel Greene was a far superior general. McCullough concludes, however, that Washington, in his opinion, was our greatest president because of his leadership.

Washington was a pondering decision maker, a deeply spiritual man but certainly not a conventional Christian. He frequently thanked God for watching over the revolution and blessing the republic, but he rarely spoke of sin or Christ. He often described God as the “Grand Architect” of the universe, “Supreme Dispenser of every Good,” and the clockmaker God of deism. He knew the importance of symbolism and used it to the nth degree. More importantly, he made an accurate assessment of where his new country was and what it would take to move it in the direction of stability.

When the Revolutionary War was going badly in 1776, General Horatio Gates launched a conspiracy of a coterie of ambitious generals to humiliate and embarrass Washington into resigning as Supreme Commander of Army. If you could picture the times, the army was low on ammunition, food and supplies; it had suffered defeat after defeat; the Continental Congress was discussing possible replacements for General Washington; and the enlistments of many of Washington’s men were coming to an end, vastly depleting his army of any ability to compete with the most powerful military force in the world, the British army and navy.

It was in this climate that he opened a letter by accident addressed to general Gates, which disclosed the plot to unseat him. He closed the letter, wrote on it that it had been opened by mistake thinking it was command business, and sent it on to the general. This quelled the conspiracy. Washington knew he needed every man including disenchanted generals.

With the majority of his troops soon to end enlistments in December 1776, he brought them all together and announced that he would give each man a $10 bonus, which was more than a month’s pay, if they would reenlist. The majority did. Washington had no way of keeping his promise, as the Continental Congress was nearly broke. His vision of the final outcome never diminished in the darkest days.

With regard to running the war, Washington knew his assets and limitations. He counted on wiser generals and used his capital to rally the troops. He had an eye for organization, discipline, accountability, and assessment. He also demonstrated a facility for recognizing and developing nascent leadership in his men. It was evident with Nathaniel Greene and Benedict Arnold.

Had Arnold died, for instance, at Saratoga where he proved a brilliant strategist and tactician, he would have been the hero of the revolution. This most decisive victory of the revolution motivated France to finance the war. When the credit for the victory went to general Horatio Gates, who had little to do with the victory, Arnold became increasingly disenchanted, ultimately spying for the British. So, today, a “Benedict Arnold” is known as a traitor or betrayer of trust.

Once the war was won, many in the Continental Congress wanted to make Washington king for life. He rejected this, and instead served two four-year terms as president with no desire to serve beyond that time, endorsing his vice president, John Adams, as the second president. Thus, he set a precedence that was maintained until the four-term election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, who died early in his fourth term (April 12, 1945).

Washington was offered a handsome salary as president, which he refused, suggesting that he only be provided with expenses. Ironically, his expenses in today’s dollars would exceed the president’s present salary.

We have not enjoyed Washingtonian leadership of late, as we have created technocrats as leaders, specifically in this instance the neocons. These people are never elected to office but are brought in by those elected.

IV WHERE HAVE ALL THE LEADERS GONE?

We know Barak Obama has a silver tongue not unlike Abraham Lincoln. Both were first term junior senators in the United States Senate from the state of Illinois; both had previously served in the house; both at an early age knew the powerful theatre of the spoken word.

We have Hillary Clinton, a United States Senator, who has served her country well, and is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, who demonstrated leadership qualities similar to previous leaders.

We have John McCain, a United States Senator, who has served his country well in the senate and on the battlefield. He is in the autumn of his years, and if elected, would be the oldest president in our history to be elected. He shares some of the personality traits of President John Adams, who was a no nonsense president, and who never had any slaves, and always said what he meant and meant what he said.

Each of these candidates have demons in their system that could knock them off their center as George Bush the Younger has been knocked off his. Did George Washington have any demons? Indeed, he did.

Washington loved affluence, pomp and circumstance, and the comfort of the elite. He loved the whole theatre of society. He didn’t like to be touched, and it was nearly theatrical when he would be forced to engage in conversation with underlings. He lacked Benjamin Franklin’s ease with everyone. He had a presence but wasn’t open or affable.

He had many critics similar to President Roosevelt. Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed FDR had a first rate personality and a second rate mind. Washington’s critics saw him second rate in both instances. What made him exceptional is that he recognized this also in himself, and in his new nation, and used it to proceed with caution and care. His vision was never clouded by his demons.

As General of the Continental Army, he parried the thrusts of Gates and his allies with the dexterity of the master politician. But when necessary, he could deflect the thrusts of his covert enemies, and when thought necessary, strike back with ferocity and guile.

Washington was an exceedingly complex man, who appreciated brilliance while knowing he lacked such brilliance. There was no hesitation to surround himself with able men, men such as Greene that could out general him. That said he maneuvered politically to retain his command, even as he simultaneously struggled to prevent the Continental Army from dissolving into mutiny.

He was a pondering man, a handsome man, a striking man, and he used this uniqueness to power him to fulfill his ambitions. He is a leader of a type that we could once again see as being our Commander in Chief.

V THE LEADER’S CONTENT OF CHARACTER

Throughout American history, we have had to endure the dalliances of the power brokers and power pursuers. These people are indigenous to all organizations in every line of endeavor. They have no real ideology, no idealism or realism, or commitment to defending the integrity of the American way of life or the citadels of freedom, although they use elements of this in the rhetoric of their essence. Their real ideology is in succeeding big time at any cost.

The temperance with which President George Washington dealt with these distracting human components is a model for all leaders to consider. It is in his letters, speeches and biographies. He was ambitious; he wanted to be the Supreme Commander of the Continental Army, but feigned that that was the furthest thing from his mind. He even wrote to his wife Martha complaining that he was doing everything to avoid this role, when he wanted nothing more desperately. Washington hid his ambition. The fire in his eyes countermanded the composure of his will.

President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, thought it should be his to refuse, but John Adams, looking at the tall, handsome, graceful Washington, resplendent in his uniform with powdered wig, nominated the general with enthusiasm. Congress concurred.

There is nothing wrong with ambition providing you have the vision to serve and the content of character to absorb attacks from within and outside your sphere of influences, without becoming paranoid, or losing your grip on the focus of your objective. Washington had this; so did Lincoln. They looked like leaders, acted like leaders, comported themselves like leaders. Eisenhower never rose to this level as president, but he did so in war.

Like Washington, Eisenhower showed great leadership as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. But again like Washington, he was an unremarkable general in the field. Truman used his paranoia as a motivator whereas Nixon was consumed by this demon. Brilliant in many other senses, Nixon and several other presidents found it difficulty to get past their demons without scandal or disruption.

VI THE FALLACIES OF CORPORATE SOCIETY

The United States has progressed to being a corporate society, that is, a corporate structure built around its central nucleus of power.

The corporation has evolved into corpocracy where there is a concentric technocratic reporting system from the center to the corporate periphery. This perfection of Machine Age Thinking is as cumbersome and faulty as any that man has ever developed. It looks good, sounds good, but fails to work efficiently if at all, while human activity is stuck with it as a societal boilerplate. Unfortunately, if flawed in the center, where power is meant to reside, but doesn’t, then a vacuum of power is created with the entire sphere collapsing in on the center.

In this scenario, everyone appears to be sharing power without anyone exercising leadership consistent with the organization’s design. The faultiness of this power structure has been well documented.

We see it in the conduct of the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq; in the subprime real estate crisis; in the collapse of the economy in on itself as the dollar plummets, oil prices surge, and wheat fields are turned into cornfields to make ethanol causing food prices to soar; in the stalled immigration policy; in the laxity of the FDA that allows drugs on the market that kill people; in our mega corporations that solve their economic woes by downsizing, exporting jobs abroad, or merging with other failed businesses; in FEMA being folded under the umbrella of Homeland Security, reduced in staff, facilities, and budget, then forgotten until Katrina; in the pride of greed on Wall Street where reality never touches until a recession threatens.

We see it in Bush’s War, which is a mirror image of all of these other components; in the that presidency as it limps to the end of its administration in worse shape than when it started nearly eight years ago; in the trade deficit in 2008 being the largest in US history; in the loss of 3.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2001; in the collapse of the dollar with the price of Gold rising from $260 an ounce in to $1,000 in the past seven plus years; and in oil going from $28 a barrel to more than $100 today.

The paradoxical dilemma of this presidency is that it unwittingly promoted a marginal extremist terrorist movement to global prominence by preemptive action, and in doing so, energized it into a far more formidable enemy than it was at first. It is a failure of leadership. One man cannot be singled out for such failure. The corporate model of construction is designed for such failure.

VII THE CHALLENGE AHEAD, CULTURE

This little piece is designed to illustrate what happens when the system is designed against itself, when departments sabotage each other instead of working in synergy; when the answers that the power center will accept are the answers it expects regardless of relevance; when leadership has devolved to leaderless leadership.

We have forgotten that human society is not a corporate group, but has evolved as a systemic diverse human entity. That system is displayed as culture. Culture is unique, diverse and individualistic. Together, these cultures form a tapestry of life as the human race, which is systemically organic, but which requires every ounce of its diversity, uniqueness and individuality to enrich the fabric of mankind.

For man to survive as human beings, this system must operate in complementary rather than competitive fashion. It starts with the single unit and progresses on to include all human society. I take the liberty of paraphrasing system researcher Russell Ackoff in this context:

“If you take a system apart to identify its central components, and then operate these central components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can irrespective of every other central component, then there is one thing of which you can be certain. The entire system will fail to behave as well as it can, and may collapse in on itself.

“Now, this is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but it is absolutely essential to System Thinking, which is the way the whole human community works or fails to work together. It is way governments work or fail to work from their central power nucleus.

“The corollary to this thinking is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can from its central components to its most peripheral components, then none of its components will be working as well as they might. Each component is supporting complementary components at some price to its own ultimate possible achievement. In doing so, synergy is realized and the possible is exceeded because the decisive outcome is much greater than the sum of the system’s component parts.”

We are on the brink of a new presidential election with our military forces stretched to the limit. The Bush’s War has been a failed policy despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. But the war is emblematic of many other societal failures. We have failed inner city schools in metropolitan areas, but we also have failed schools in the suburbs. We have crime in the poorest and most affluent of neighborhoods. We have empty houses because of the subprime debacle, but also empty factories because of failed industrial leadership. We have our best students in high schools and colleges across the land bored to tears attending classes because that is their job, and not because they are committed to learning anything. We have middle aged men and women who have never caught hold because they have never totally left their adolescence, extending it from their teens into their 30s and 40s. We have our great cities attempting to balance between the electronic Silicon Valley and failed Detroit factory model trying to survive. Our entire society is collapsing in on itself because the nucleus of central power has proven essentially a leaderless leadership vacuum.

As if the gods were upon us at this critical moment, we have one of the most refreshing moments in American history in a presidential candidate that is African American, a presidential candidate who is a woman, and a presidential candidate that is a throwback to our second great president, John Adams. Never has the challenge of culture, and the opportunities to heal differences in a common cause been greater than now.

The good paying factory jobs of Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia are never to return. These candidates are talking about saving these jobs or retraining workers in new technologies. The irony is that our school system from grammar school through college is a preparatory factory, which is now anachronistic.

Corporate society has a factory mentality and discharges its problems with a factory mindset. Indeed, education is a defunct institution because of this. Corpocracy attacks problems at the periphery rather than at the nuclear core or power center, as power brokers, power pursuers, and politicians are wont to do.

A cosmetic approach to the problem solving doesn’t disturb the status quo. Item: create a new course, design a new curriculum, or launch a new corporate intervention, always being careful not to disturb the technocrats in the core center. We must move beyond this; we must start by introducing our little ones to the real world they are about to join.

Ergo, I propose that no student be given a high school diploma or college degree that is not proficient in a foreign language. No college graduate should be allowed to sneak through the system dodging language courses with computer proficiency. Computer literacy is not the equivalent of culture literacy. The only way to truly enter another culture is through its language, and we are now a world society.

Culture is destiny. Culture is not isolated but pervasive. Appreciation of culture is what is missing in education.

For within a culture, there are several subcultures. Often these subcultures compete subversively against the primary culture. This was the case of the Department of Defense subverting the Department of State, and intimidating the CIA to capitulate to its preconceived notion of the presence of WMDs in Iraq, when clearly there were none. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of the integrity of the Office of the President, where the nucleus of central power resided.

When the center collapses in on itself, all subcultures across the spectrum from the farthest dimensions of the corporate structure do as well. This succinctly describes the disaster of the Bush’s War and the present socio-economic state of American society.

Likewise, every nation, as well as every corporation, has a culture, and within its culture a myriad of competing subcultures often contrasting with or in direct competition with the primary culture. It is the role of leadership to first recognize this condition, and then to mount an exercise to integrate these differences into an assimilated pattern of focused determination while acknowledging the respective unique constructions of the subcultures. This sounds simple in expression but is extremely difficult to accomplish in deed. It is why culture is the challenge ahead of true leadership.
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Dr. Fisher is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd., a prolific author, and a registered Republican for more than forty years. See his website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com.