I've often commented on President Bush's seriously messed up decision-making process, his complete intolerance for dissent, his overreliance on 'yes men,' his utter refusal to consider anything that doesn't conform to his pre-conceived notions.
The president's supporters say this is merely strong leadership, that it's a result of him not changing his mind as often he changes his underwear. But it's worth noting that while Churchill (to whom many ardent Bush supporters like to compare the president) 'stayed the course' during World War II, so did Hitler. There's a fine line between having a backbone and denying reality. President Bush is consistently on the wrong side of that line.
This large character flaw, far more than his ideology, is his most significant weakness in my opinion. It matters because a primary function of a chief executive is... making decisions.
His ignorance or dismissal of history led him to conclude that any occupation, reconstruction and restoration of normal civil society in Iraq would be a piece of cake. As a result, the administration refused to consider the possibility that any (non-Baathist) Iraqi could possibly see an American invasion as a colonial excursion. In his own heart, Bush probably did consider it a liberation. But his thought process made him incapable of conceiving the remotest possibility that anyone of good faith might view the invasion differently. 'We mean well' thus became 'Everyone obviously knows we mean well.'
This account in Newsweek sheds further light on the bubble from which the president operates.
Hurricane Katrina ripped through the New Orleans area on Monday August 29.
President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad, goes the official account. The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor [Dan] Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
The analysis continues: How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
When he was president, Bill Clinton's decision-making process was often criticized; it was the polar opposite of Bush's. Clinton was accused of being a waffler, of not having the guts to take tough decisions. This approach is flawed like Bush's: his refusal to stand up to the increasingly popular Republicans and support a proposed East African-intervention in the Rwandan genocide led to hundreds of thousands of people being massacred. This just shows that there's a fine line between standing firm and recognizing reality.
But Bush's style is equally, if not more, damaging. Waffling leads to inaction, which should at least please anti-government types. But when an institutional culture discourages or even punishes people for questioning bad proposals, then those bad proposals become bad policies... or disastrous ones. It doesn't help when people who should know better enable those disastrous decisions rather than resigning on principle.
Newsweek's analysis concluded that the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.
It's hard to argue with this.
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