Our Tolerance For Failure

The highlight of last week’s (8/3) Senate Armed Services Committee meeting was not Hillary Clinton’s indictment of Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, it was a statement made by Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton.

Questioning the witnesses--Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Pace and John Abizaid--on why so many Americans are against the occupation of Iraq, Dayton elegantly reframed the issue:

“It isn’t their will--the will of the American people--that’s being tested. It’s their tolerance for failure.”

And many of those failures were on display at the hearing, including the inability of civilian leaders to grasp realities on the ground. When Senator Clinton blamed our inability to secure Iraq (its infrastructure and weapons stockpiles) on inadequate troop levels, an incredulous Rummy responded:

“You said the number of troops were wrong. Well, I guess history will make a judgment on that.”

Sorry, Rummy. History already has. You blew it and the whole world knows.

But Rummy wasn’t finished. He went on a tirade about the viciousness of our enemy, describing their side as barbaric and lawless while our “side puts their men and women at risk in uniform and obeys the laws of war.”

Sorry again, Rummy. We haven't obeyed the laws of war, and your administration is still looking for ways to circumvent those rules.

Rummy urged that “we should strive to think through how our words will be interpreted by our troops, by the people of Afghanistan and Iraq...and we should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy.”

But Rummy and the Bush team have done little to think through how their actions and mistakes will be used by our deadly enemy. Actions like torture, indefinite detention, murder, rendition, pitifully incompetent planning and a failed reconstruction. Perhaps nobody ever told the Secretary that actions speak louder than words.

When confronted with examples of incompetence, Rummy replied that there were “an awful lot of talented people engaged in this.” But he didn't explain how that excused the horrific miscalculations, faulty assumptions and bad policies the invasion suffered.

One of those supposedly talented people, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace, tried to clarify our mission in Iraq: “To help provide enough security inside of Iraq for the Iraqi government to provide governance and economic opportunity for their citizens.”

No wonder so many Senators are concerned. By Pace's definition, we've been failing in Iraq from the start, and the trend-line has steepened downward. How does Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sum up the situation? From a recent CNN interview:

“Well, I think the problem is that everybody takes a snapshot every day of how we're doing in what is a huge and historical transformation...But I would be surprised, if you look back on the other big historical transformations that the world has been through, that people didn't do the same thing. I think they probably took snapshots that now, in retrospect, when you look back on them, look pretty shortsighted.”

Sadly, Condi misses the fact that when you put all those snapshots in a line, they form a time series--a video--of what’s been happening, and that video is an appalling testament to a long, slow, downward slide.

Asked by CNN’s David Gregory, “when does staying the course become less a strategy and more of a copout?”, Rice responded:

“David, we've just begun the Baghdad security plan. Malaki has only been in office several weeks.”

Except that we’ve occupied Baghdad and Iraq for almost three-and-a-half years and have never been able to maintain order. Indeed, according to General Abizaid, "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Condi and Rummy want us to believe that a sustained, growing failure will somehow be reversed by the same people whose ineptitude made the failure inevitable.

Until they stop drinking the White House Kool-Aid, they won’t be able to change course. But to a brittle, dispirited and besieged administration, change might be impossible. At this political moment, a course correction might only confirm what so many have alleged--that the Bush team made a strategic blunder of historic proportions, executed that strategy with total incompetence and deserve to be shown the political door.

How much longer will the American public tolerate their failure?