Plenty of high-profile officials have quit the White House in frustration — Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio, Rand Beers. But a startlingly small number have been fired for their mistakes and incompetence, or resigned as a way of taking responsibility for failure.
I can usually take or leave the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, but today, he had an excellent column highlighting a terrific point.
What happened March 25 was that one Washington institution quoted another to ask a third about accountability. The questioner was PBS’s Jim Lehrer, who cited the late James Reston of the New York Times to ask Donald Rumsfeld why no one in Washington ever resigns for just being wrong. Rumsfeld, oozing cockiness, turned the personal into the theoretical and waltzed away from the question. I don’t blame him. If, say, a Japanese government had performed as badly as the Bush administration has, there would be no one left to turn out the lights.
In his questioning of Rumsfeld, the nimble Lehrer brought up Lord Carrington, the British defense minister at the time Argentina seized the Falkland Islands. Carrington admitted he had underestimated the threat and his resignation was therefore in order. If Rumsfeld had applied that rule to himself, he would be thrice gone — once for Sept. 11, 2001; once for the absence of WMD in Iraq; and once more for not having enough troops in Iraq. If he were his own subordinate, he would fire himself.
But from the president on down, no one in this administration ever admits a mistake or concedes having been wrong. Dick Cheney, whose slogan should be “Wrong Where It Matters,” nonetheless takes to the stump to lambaste John Kerry. After all, the vice president is the very man who warned us, assured us, promised us that we must go to war with Iraq because, among other things, that nation had an ongoing nuclear weapons program. None has yet been found — and no apology from Cheney has yet been issued. He was mistaken or dishonest. We await his choice.
Cohen added:
What is so perturbing about this administration is not that no one of note has resigned or been fired — and some of them certainty deserve the ax — but that there is not the slightest hint that anyone (except Colin Powell) appreciates that mistakes were made not out of sheer bad luck but because the assumptions, driven by ideology, were so bad.
Forgive the blog-world cliché, but go read the whole thing.