Bush did not set out to miss the mark, of course, but his inattention to the execution of his grand ideas has had fatal consequences.

Trouble From the Top Down - Bush did not set out to miss the mark, of course, but his inattention to the execution of his grand ideas has had fatal consequences.
By Jonathan Alter
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.



Dec. 18, 2006 issue - In government, the tone set at the top can be as powerful as the mightiest army. It reverberates through everything. The history of the American presidency is the story of the character and temperament of the man in the Oval Office coursing through thousands of smaller decisions, often thousands of miles away. If the president is supple and open-minded, those decisions made many layers below him are more likely to be agile and empirical. If he's stubborn and too sure that he has all the answers, the modeling of his behavior is likely to result in decisions you would ground your teenager for.

This process is uncanny and usually unconscious, the product less of explicit orders or egregious boot-licking than of bureaucratic osmosis. The temperament of the chief leaches into the performance of functionaries he has never met.

Fortuitously, presidential personality traits have often led to major accomplishment. FDR was a great believer in experimentation, so the legions below him launched hundreds of experimental programs to fight the Depression. Ike was a champion of logistics during World War II, so it figured that the Interstate Highway System got built on his watch. LBJ was a master legislator, so it was no coincidence that his presidency featured scads of legislation. (His insecurities, in turn, contributed to the Vietnam debacle.) In recent years, George H.W. Bush's habit of writing endless thank-you notes bore indirect fruit in the gracious and face-saving way he managed the demise of the Soviet Union. Bill Clinton's messy but thorough policy analysis led to dozens of small, well-built initiatives that worked with surprising consistency.

The United States in the Second Bush Era has not been as fortunate. Beyond the headlines and major policy recommendations, the Iraq Study Group's mercifully readable report shows how President Bush's personal shortcomings manifest themselves in appalling miscues on the ground.

Consider this largely overlooked portion of the report: "Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency. In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communications with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage."

Disadvantage? Nah. Who could imagine that having only .6 percent of our personnel who speak the native language might cause us some problems over there? If the damn Iraqis would just learn English we wouldn't be in this mess! Bush did not set out to miss the mark, of course, but his inattention to the execution of his grand ideas has had fatal consequences. At $8 billion per month in Iraq, you would think we'd have a few more people there who could find their way to the bathroom.

After 9/11, the absence of Arabic speakers was a big story. Analysts all agreed that we could not stop terrorism without addressing the problem. A different kind of president would have ordered a Manhattan Project-style crash program to teach the difficult-to-learn language in schools. Such a "National Security Language Initiative" was finally launched—with little notice, money or presidential attention—this year, five years late.

In the meantime, several reports highlighting the shortage have "gathered dust," the president's words for what usually happens to Washington studies. They show that as of 2006 only 33 FBI agents—1 percent—have even limited proficiency in Arabic. (The bureau claims its outside contractors can do the job.) One of the tiny handful who is actually fluent, Special Agent Bassem Youssef, is currently engaged in a lawsuit over his rough treatment inside the FBI. (The fact that he is of Arab descent apparently made him suspicious.) Among other terrifying revelations, the suit has shown in eye popping videotaped depositions that the men who run FBI counterterrorism efforts don't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

This is what happens when you have a president who is incurious and impatient with inconvenient facts he doesn't "need to know": hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, nearly 3,000 dead Americans and what the Baker-Hamilton Commission estimates as a $2 trillion tab for our children.

Another part of their report touches on an even darker example of presidential tone-setting. In identifying a "significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq," the commission explains how the administration cooks the books on Iraqi casualties: "If we [the U.S. government] cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, the assault does not make it into the data base. A roadside bomb or a rocket or a mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count."

Ponder that. For more than three years, those whining, negative journalists who reported "too much bad news" out of Iraq were actually soft-pedaling the problem, thanks to the bogus statistics on which they still depend. A war that was launched by twisting intelligence is being lost while twisting body counts. Shakespeare's "tangled web" of deceit was woven at the top, but its threads extend everywhere.