Leadership and Responsibility
Jesse
Jan 5, 2010
The first refuge of weak leaders is blaming mistakes on subordinates. It’s unacceptable in the military, in corporate hierarchies, and in other settings where the responsibilities and authorities of leadership are understood and practiced. Harry Truman enshrined the concept with the famous maxim, “The buck stops here.” The principle is that a leader is responsible for everything his or her organization does or fails to do. When a U.S. Navy ship runs aground, the captain of the ship isn’t going to point to a junior officer who was serving as OOD (officer of the deck) and say, “It’s not my fault; it’s his fault!”
President Obama obviously doesn’t understand this basic concept of leadership. When he finally got around to responding publicly to the incident of the Christmas underwear bomber, he tried to lay blame on the intelligence community. Not my fault, he was saying — they screwed up. What he doesn’t understand is that they work for him, and he’s responsible for what they do.
The President also doesn’t understand another important principle of leadership. Good leaders give credit for success to their subordinates and take the blame for failures. Does anyone doubt that he would have made liberal use of the vertical pronoun in taking credit for a first year in office with no serious terrorism attempts?
It’s also evident that Obama doesn’t know much about intelligence. In that sense, he’s no different from most politicians. They seem to think that providing enough dollars to the various intelligence agencies of the U.S. government will ensure that surprises never happen and threats never go undetected. The truth is that intelligence will always be imperfect because it deals with one huge uncertainty — what our enemies intend to do. In the wake of 9/11 the politicians decided to reorganize because they didn’t understand why the attacks weren’t anticipated and prevented. They added new layers of bureaucracy and management, but in the end, predictably, the system still misses small indicators out of the millions they have to deal with all the time.
If the President were a good leader, he would have taken responsibility for the failure of his government to identify and act on this threat. Then he would have worked internally to fix any weaknesses in the intelligence system and possibly fire anyone who was clearly responsible for failure at critical points. He may still do some of this, but we’ll be able to judge how serious (and competent) he is by whether he forms a committee or commission to publicly find fault and recommend solutions. That’s the politician’s way, and it’s intended primarily to deflect responsibility and present the image of action.
Meanwhile, the Christmas underwear bomber may have done us a favor. The Obama Administration, with strong support from the media, has attempted to de-emphasize the fact that we are at war. Whether it’s called “the war on terror” or “the war against Islamist extremism” or something else, the key word is “war.” If we understand the reality of what’s happening to us and the nature of the unrelenting foe we face, then we’ll no longer be able to justify this as little more than a criminal justice problem. The underwear bomber is a foreign national who attempted to carry out a deadly attack on our homeland. But instead of treating him like the enemy combatant he is, he was arrested, given all the rights of a U.S. citizen, and promptly “lawyered-up.” Instead of interrogating him like a prisoner of war, all we can hope to do is make a deal with him for a lighter sentence if he’ll give us information that might help prevent a future attack. That’s an absurd reaction to the threat we face, and this case may generate needed changes — if not from the government, then from an alarmed public.
President Obama needs to adjust his attitude and begin behaving like a wartime leader. He’s responsible for the security of the United States, and everything else must come second.
For additional information:
Intelligence Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal
U.S. Intensifies Screening for Travelers From 14 Nations, The New York Times
Obama aide defends trial for suspect in Christmas Day attempt to bomb plane, The Washington Post
(This article was also published at Opinion Forum.)
Unless people are reminded reguarly they forget just how bad previous administrations were, I have never been more terrified before or since the time reagan was in power(although bush 1 and 2 came close), a true case of the ability to kill everything on the planet in the hands of a man who should have been in kept in his own house not the whitehouse.
What complete and utter BS!
Where were these outcries during the Bush administration? Obama responded publicly 3 days faster than Bush did about the “shoe bomber.”
And Bush did NOTHING but blame the intelligence operations. The ones that had actually served it up on a plate with the memo that Condi never bothered to read.
You guys are laughable. And two-faced.
At first, I thought that maybe Obama would be a better president than this because he favored ending the war in Iraq (where we had no business being) and favored fixing our rather shitty health care system. Now, I’m not saying McCain would have been better (let’s face it, the man was a mummy who favored continuing the war despite the trillions of dollars it would have cost the American taxpayer), but Obama has more or less become everything the paranoid right-wings was afraid of. He’s slowly taking away our rights under the guise of making our nation better, not to mention he’s going to more or less make it a crime to be poor with his health care plan of fining people who don’t have health care (usually because they can’t afford it).