Ambushed on the Potomac

The January/February 2009 issue of The National Interest includes an article by Richard Perle entitled “Ambushed on the Potomac” (no, there isn’t an online version – you will have to find a copy in your library to read the whole article). The gist of the article is that the Federal bureaucracy is a world unto itself, with its own settled world view and prejudices and agenda, and President-elect Obama will soon find, as President Bush did, that he can say what he likes in speeches, but that the civil servants in the State Department and Defense Department and CIA and other key agencies in the bureaucracy will in the end work to implement their own agenda, not his.

Two paragraphs in the article especially drew my attention:

For eight years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government – sometimes frantically – never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the sprawling bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president’s policies. They didn’t need his directives: they had their own.

and

It will not be easy to asses objectively the foreign and security policy of the Bush administration anytime soon. Its central feature, the war in Iraq, has generated emotions that all but preclude rational discourse. And it will be nearly impossible to persuade those whose minds are made up – often on the basis of tendentious reporting and reckless blogs – to reconsider what they firmly believe they know. Too much has been written and said that is wildly inaccurate and too many of those who have expressed judgments have done so, not as disinterested observers, but as partisan participants in a rancorous debate.

In the early 1890’s there was a wonderful British TV comedy series entitled “Yes Minister” in which the elected minister, attempting to bring change to his department, is outwitted in each episode by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, a long-serving civil servant with far-flung tentacles throughout the civil servant establishment. Richard Perle argues that much the same happens in real life in the American bureaucracy, and that this accounts for much of the confusion and ineptness in execution that we see from our government.