The CIA vs. the CEO -- Part 1

Rummy and Dubya discuss strategery.

This is a three-part ramble, and I selected the pic above because it's from one of my all-time, desert island favorite moves: Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory".

Because it's one of the most brilliant, heartbreaking and efficiently plotted meditations on the price men pay when they find themselves powerless and imperiled in the hands of weak, vain, foolish and unaccountable power.

The specific of the story come to this: In WWI, in the heart of bloody trench warfare, elements of the French Army are being murderously hurled against an impregnable German position called “The Anthill”. Everyone knows it cannot be breached; that it is suicidal to even try. And yet for sordid reasons that have nothing to do with “victory” – a word that is utterly meaningless in this context to begin with – and safe behind the lines, General Mireau continues to do just that.

The meat of the movie plays out as doomed soldiers up and down the chain of command react to hopeless orders, and the scapegoating that begins after one hopeless assault fails.

Good men die or are caught up in the gears of an evil system. And like the rats and rot in the trenches, the weak and the sadistic thrive and fester in the nooks of the system, using it as a chance for advancement or to settle scores.

Those are the specifics, but it is a merciless reflection of what happens any time corrupt men are given unchecked and unaccountable power.

Which leads us out of a screening room and smack into the White House.

As we live through our own, devastating repetition of the same pathology.

Our real, live “Christopaths of Glory”.

There has been much said in the press over the last five years about Bush’s “CEO Style” of management. Setting a series of broad goals and operating parameters and leaving the details to soulless golem who at least theoretically have more active brain cells than Preznit Tipsy underlings is the inevitable form that the huge job of being the President must take.

Fine.

And there have been any number of leak-driven headlines about the brush war between the CIA and the White House especially over the last two years since the Administration has decided to play Pin The Failure on the Intel with the spooks at Langley. And while I have no special, penetrating information about what goes on in the churning viscera of the CIA (and was raised to have a massive distrust of an Agency with such a checkered past.) But I also live in the Real World and know that a powerful nation needs its agents and its analysts, and sometimes needs them to do things that might make Ben Franklin flinch.

Which is why there must be strict oversight by men and women who are both pragmatists, and get positively priapistic thinking about the beauty of the United States Constitution.

Yes, the CIA has done dreadful things. And, yes, it has been radically and repeatedly politicized -- first by Nixon and then, restarting the bone-rotting, hooker-ethics-based, “Tell me what I want to hear” culture, by Reagan. But there is also no way to dodge around this cold fact: as we absolutely require a National Weather Service to tell us what storms are over the horizon and heading our way, so we also absolutely required an Agency as devoid as possible of political devoted to collecting intel from every part of the world, sifting it, and telling our elected leaders what to look out for.

Of course hurricanes and terrorists have at least two things in common: First, each have destructive potentials that can be mitigated by advanced planning and timely warnings and, second, the fact that there is no way to force ideologically blinded imbeciles in the West Wing to look at that data honestly, comprehend intelligently it and act on it responsibly.


The problem is, of course, the entire structure modern CEO position is the antithesis of what the Founders had in mind for the man who presides over the federal government.

It is, among other things, set up to allow the man on top to take big gambles and to be somewhat shielded from the consequences when the gambles don’t pay off.

Now this is not an altogether bad thing: If you’re running a vibrant company that encourages innovation you are going to churn up a lot of bad ideas. Dozens of tons of Fool’s Gold for every ounce of the real thing, and if you’re at the top your job is to tease out the genuine article.

And you are gonna fuck up every now and them.

Of course if you pick too many dogs and you’re gone, but such as system -- when it works well – allows the CEO mechanism to act as a cushion against caution and a hedge against ossification.

Fine.

Government, OTOH, should virtually always be the most conservative (in the original, unbesmirched meaning of that word) bunch of sticklers in room. In other words, the government has absolutely no fucking business taking the kinds of wild risks with other people’s money that were the hallmark of George Bush tenure screwing Arbusto into the Texas desert and Neil Bush’s bust-out of Silverado Savings and Loan.


This is a family of weak men, leeches and crybaby princelings and anyone with a functional cerebral cortex could see that letting a dimwitted creep like George W. Bush occupy the Oval Office would be a disaster. Which, of course, meant that the GOP Base thought it was a fucking brilliant idea.

And WTF, even after seven years of partisan carpet-bombing, Clinton was cleaning our his desk in the White House and retiring with a nation at peace and with budget surpluses as far as the eye could see.

So how bad could George H. W.’s idiot son be?

Especially with George Schultz, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Jim Baker and all the rest of the GOP A-List lending the little dope their competence and bracing his incompetence against complete collapse from every side.

Some of us knew full-well what it would probably be like to have a vicious, stupid, cowardly Imperial CEO, buffered from scrutiny a gutless, complicit Republican Congress.

A man who was hired by swine who view government – not Small government, or Large government, or Smart government or Responsive government…but ANY Government – as a failed product line full of nags and auditors to be gutted and outsourced so that Corporations could complete their evolution and take direct control of the United States. And use all of that yummy-yummy jurisprudent and military power to advance the causes and fortunes of the few.

And now, after five years of this tragedy of a Presidency and comedy of a Congress we can see the results: The craven bleatings of Kenny-Boy Lay and Heckuva-Job Dubya have become indistinguishable from one another, because they are both spun from the same ethically debased DNA.

Both men are the most degenerate example of the CEO culture where leaders not only are unaccountable, but arrogantly braying that they deserve to be unaccountable. That how DARE any mere mortal tread on that special set of Divine Law vouchsafed to them and them alone by their Boards and Almighty God to do whatever the fuck they want, whenever they damned well feel like it.

End Part 1.