A weird time to be working for the government
Dateline: Crown Plaza, Crystal City, Arlington VA, 28 June 2004
End of a long day. Started with 3&1/4 hour brief to new US Air Force class of one-star generals, then segued to 2&1/2 hour brief to the Secretary of Defense’s Corporate Fellows Program (a best and brightest group of officers sent to corporate America for a year to learn about the world outside the Pentagon). Day ends with a dinner meeting with some people who are offering me the possibility of a new home for this site that would leverage their next-generation capabilities on the web.
Meanwhile, it’s getting hard not to pick up the palpable sense, both here in DC and around the country, that Bush could well be going down in this election. Inside the Beltway, the State Department honors diplomats who openly challenged the White House on its foreign policies decision in Iraq over the past year (“Diplomats Honored For Dissent: Envoys Challenged Bush Foreign Policy,” by Peter Slevin, Washington Post, 28 June, p. A19), while the largest federal employees union announces its endorsement of Kerry (“Federal Employees’ Union Endorses Kerry,” by Christopher Lee, Washington Post, 28 June, p. A19). Outside the Beltway, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” scores the highest box-office total ever for a documentary film in its first weekend, doing some serious business in so-called red states, or those historically considered in the Bush camp (“The Political ‘Fahrenheit’ Sets Record At Box Office,” by Sharon Waxman, New York Times, 28 June, p. B1). Beyond the borders of this country, the experience in Iraq calls into question the central foreign policy of this administration, or the so-called Bush Doctrine of preemptive war (“Iraq Occupation Erodes Bush Doctrine,” by Robin Wright, Washington Post, 28 June, p. A1.).
Where does all this seem to go? At the very least it engenders a weird sense of career crossroads for me: the material has never seemed stronger in terms of its appeal to a broad audience, and yet the natural partisanship of the election season leaves me feeling oddly protective of this administration even as its enters its period of harshest criticism surrounding the handover in Iraq. Part of me hates the notion of starting over with a new crew, because it’s a hassle and there’s so much inefficiency in waiting for everything to restart again in the Pentagon as one slew of political masters is exchanged for another. But another part of me gets excited by the challenge of testing my material’s bipartisan appeal—in effect the message is meaningless if it can’t be translated across administrations as they come and go (and they will always come and go as far as the Pentagon is concerned).
But the biggest part of me simply wants the U.S. military to succeed in Iraq, because ultimately this is my home team, with whom I live, work and breathe on a daily basis, and frankly, right now they’re facing the acid test in Iraq (“Biggest Task for U.S. General Is Training Iraqis to Fight Iraqis,” by Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 27 June, p. A1), so any sense of getting jacked up by a Democratic win in November that’s fueled by a sense of failure in Iraq makes me feel more than a bit queasy. It’s like cheering your team’s losses so it can get the top pick in next year’s draft.
For me, at least, a big part of working for the federal government is believing in what you do—day in and day out. I decided long ago that even as I worked as a Democrat within the Department of Defense, it wasn’t going to be a situation whereby I sat out “enemy” administrations (either literally by leaving the government or figuratively by “going my own way”) and only played goal line-to-goal line when “my” team was in power. Life’s too short, administrations are too long, and America means too much to me. Plus, in working with the first Bush administration (as contractor), then two Clintons (contractor, then government employee), and now back with Bush the younger (always as employee), I’ve always made a point on working on those aspects of the foreign policy I felt comfortable pursuing, even if I didn’t always care for the execution of that overall policy in an A-to-Z sense. In short, I prefer to strike whatever matches I’m provided than curse the darkness.
And yes, it’s not lost on me that much of my recent “rise” is based on the notion that my book presents a solution set to the strategic failure that our occupation in Iraq has so far yielded (even as I believe in its long-term success)—i.e., the notion that the need for the bifurcation of the U.S. military into separate Leviathan (warfighting) and Sys Admin (peacewaging) forces is “proven” by events in Iraq (e.g., the Michael O’Hanlon verdict on why I should declare “victory”). Absent that failure, a major portion of my emerging reputation as “strategic seer” would be missing-in-the-action that was yet another neocon success story (the comeback I often got in my brief following the success in Afghanistan was, “Our great-power-war military did just fine taking down the Taliban, so why should we refocus our forces on this new paradigm you offer?”).
Deep down I know that even if Bush loses (something I still remain personally skeptical about), nothing really changes in the international security environment that my vision, my book, and my material—I believe—so accurately captures. All that reality out there remains: globalization will continue to encroach upon the Middle East, that encroachment will engender a scary response from some in those quarters, and the global war on terrorism will continue to rage on—whether we engage it in an avowed fashion or not. The Gap will have to be shrunk and the U.S. military will be inevitably called upon in a frequent fashion to deal with the worst “bad actor” players and regimes within those regions. It all may be called something different by a different administration, but none of the underlying reality will change, even as the relative emphases placed on particular aspects will rise and ebb—as they naturally do over the course of time.
So what to do in the months ahead? The simplest and smartest answer is to stick with what I know best: working with the next generation of military leaders for the tasks I know they’ll be called upon to complete in a global war on terrorism . . . or whatever this struggle gets called next.
That’s what this day has been all about—a good reminder of where I work, whom I serve, and why I continue to love this job.