Flatline & Brooks - December 15, 2006
JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Johnny, what are your thoughts about Donald Rumsfeld tonight?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He was nothing more than a defense contractor lobbyist put in charge of the piggy bank. He was allowed to invent any justification imaginable, so long as the money kept flowing. I’d say as a lobbyist who was supposed to maximize the profits of the largest private contractors, and he perfected the task. A huge pile of money was spent very quickly. While hundreds of thousands of dead people will go unnoticed in his path, he was surely worshipped by those defense contractor executives, who all soothe each other’s egos with false justifications for their immoral lives. And as you may have noticed, the soldiers in general don’t benefit from this spending. They are constantly shorted. But that’s because of the inescapable fact that the money flow is being maximized to the private sector. It’s a huge waste resources and power. So Rumsfeld might hold the number one spot as the fastest waster of power in the history of the world. He, like Bush, was handed more power than nearly anybody in history, and he squandered as much of it as he could. He may not know it, because he is so well indoctri-ego-nated, he believes most of his own bullshit.
JIM LEHRER: Does he deserve all the blame he's getting, David?
DAVID BROOKS: I do. I think he does deserve quite a lot of blame. I don't think he's a scapegoat.
I mean, I understood going into Baghdad and the first rush up with whatever he had, 130,000. What I don't understand was why he didn't adapt the number of troop levels after that. When it became clear to people in the White House, when it became clear to John McCain, when it became clear in what has become clear in every single book and article that's been written about what went wrong, there wasn't enough troops, and there was no order in society. Why he didn't adapt in May of '03, in June, in July? And more than that, why did he suppress any sort of debate that could have happened about that within the military? And he didn't.
And one of the things he did not do was cultivate a climate of open debate. So a lot of people within the military who privately held one opinion didn't say it, and maybe they should have. But it would have taken a lot of courage, and part of that was his fault.
And then the final thing I'd say about him -- and I agree he was the most well-qualified public servant maybe of our lifetime and the most destructive at the same time -- but the final thing I'd say about him -- and this he shares with, I think, a lot of people in the White House and in the Pentagon, was that he saw the war as killing bad guys and controlling territory. And as many essayists and reporters over there made clear, the enemy saw the war as controlling the narrative and winning the war of ideas. And they were playing a different game than we were, and they were beating us at it.
JIM LEHRER: Everybody says -- and I'm sure the two of you would agree -- that whatever else Donald Rumsfeld is, he's a very smart man. So all the things that you all have just outlined are not the actions of a smart man. So what happened?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I can’t believe you dared to say that. This is the dumbest administration this country has ever experienced. This is the most incredible congregation of ignorance I have ever witnessed. Rumsfeld is obviously not a smart man. Read the book Emotional Intelligence. Rumsfeld‘s emotional intelligence is at the level of retardation. Many criminals in our history are smart people. But they share one thing in common - emotional ignorance. Don’t confuse a guy’s ability to solve a calculus equation with a guy like Jesus or Ghandi, who can lead a million poor people to safety.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think that he sought out the guys who wouldn't speak up and wouldn't...
DAVID BROOKS: Every book, whether it's the Ricks' book, the Gordon book, every book underlines that. That's one of the things.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: America is constantly sold on the idea that we are strong enough to police the world to our will. That‘s even harder when our will has no moral authority behind the objectives. The world cannot be dominated by force. Leadership is not about the meanest guy in the room. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld think the world is a cold, cruel, crazy place that only listens to death and torture. It‘s a huge miscalculation about leadership and humanity. They have no clue about these things. An empire should never ever, ever reveal the full extend of it‘s power. The minute you do that, you have shown the entire world your limits and greatly weakened your hand. A truly wise leader will rule without ever having to use significant force. War does not mean glory. War means you were too stupid to work things out. War signifies failure. The Bush administration has no desire to resolve anything peacefully, which puts them in the same pile of trash as any violent dictatorship.
DAVID BROOKS: I do have a theory, because I think there is a straight line that goes through his career. He comes out of college in the '50s and '60s. The country had a lot of big bureaucracies. A smart guy comes out and says, "You know, we're getting fat."
JIM LEHRER: He was a Navy pilot.
DAVID BROOKS: Right.
JIM LEHRER: Which was a risk-taking business.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. And he says, "I'm not going to be an organization man. I'm going to streamline bureaucracies." He did it in the Nixon administration. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He did it at G.D. Searle. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He came to the Pentagon...
JIM LEHRER: That was a chemical company that made artificial sweeteners.
DAVID BROOKS: He became the CEO.
JIM LEHRER: Yes, exactly.
DAVID BROOKS: And then he came here and he decided to streamline a bureaucracy, with emphasizing technology over manpower. And there are many challenges for which that probably would have been the perfect solution. But occupying Iraq was not that challenge, and so he was mismatched to the problem.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I still say he was perfect for the task. He maximized war profits to the profiteers. Well done. Oh yeah, and there some people dyeing. Oh well. It’s complicated.
JIM LEHRER: And everything leading up to that has been, "Oh, no, we've got plenty of troops. We can do everything. We're not anywhere near cracking," and all of a sudden they're cracking.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The man is not capable of seeing his own failure.
DAVID BROOKS: The world changed, and what we've had when this decentralized sort of enemy is a different sort of enemy -- in some ways, to be fair to Rumsfeld, he was very cutting-edge on technological matters. He is not a stick in the mud, whatever you can accuse him of. He's not someone who believes in doing things the old-fashioned way.
But I don't think he quite -- and, to be fair, I'm not sure any of us quite guessed what is actually happening in the world and the kind of enemy we face. There are people in the Pentagon -- George Packer, in the New Yorker, current New Yorker, has an essay on this -- people within the Pentagon talking about the need for anthropologists to understand the culture of Iraq.
And that's something the Pentagon in general, and I think Rumsfeld in particular, had some trouble with.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I‘m not prepared to give an ounce of credit to any enemy. This is not anything new. We‘ve see it all before. We have talked about repeating Vietnam. Well, we did. We repeated Vietnam. It‘s the same damn thing, in every way.
DAVID BROOKS: Just one more thing to spread the blame a little, I mean, the relationship with Cheney is key. One little story that's I think in Bob Woodward's book, there's a woman named Meghan O'Sullivan, who was an Iraq expert. She was going to be involved in the postwar planning before the war.
Cheney and Rumsfeld got her removed from the planning, though she knows a lot about Iraq, because she was not on board, I think, with Chalabi, one of the people they wanted to install. She had a dissenting voice. She was kicked off, sidelined, and that sort of thing just sends a message.
And so, you know, Cheney was involved. And, to be fair, the president, for all this time, he's the boss, and he should have done something.
JIM LEHRER: Meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group, what's happened to it? And its recommendations, where are we with that, two weeks later?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: From what I‘ve heard, Bush is pissed off big time about what Baker did, and he‘s not about to give an inch to it. Bush is apparently a man on edge, hating just about everybody there is to hate.
JIM LEHRER: And having his own listening tour.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He‘s a cornered dog as the great journalist Doug Thompson will tell you. I agree.
DAVID BROOKS: He did take a year and a half to go to war. In any case, on the Iraq Study Group, I would say it is fading. The White House has not embraced it.
Certainly, talking to Iran they don't believe in. The Republicans in general don't think that the road to peace in Baghdad leads through Jerusalem. They just think that's a flawed strategy.
The Iraqis are certainly contemptuous of it; they certainly don't like it. And the Democrats have not embraced it; they've been sort of lukewarm about it.
So I think, when you look back on the lasting effect of the Iraq Study Group, I think it will have prolonged our presence in Iraq, because I think, after the election, people could have said, "The voters sent a message. Let's get out of Iraq."
Then you had the likes of Republican Senator Gordon Smith saying, "I'm at the end of my rope." Without the Iraq Study Group, you could really kind of brought kind of momentum, "We're out of here." But the Iraq Study Group froze the debate for a month, and then said, you know, slow, gradual withdrawal. And so I think, perversely, the end effect was to keep us there longer.
JIM LEHRER: You buy that?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know. It feels like there’s a civil war developing in the real base of power - which is literally within the Republican party. This Baker group thing was rather incredible, and their slap in Bush’s face in public was also very incredible. This outdoes Stephen Colbert big time. And now Bush is blowing it off as nonsense. That was a very unwise move, because he’s not just blowing off some commission. He’s blowing off some of the very center of world power. For people of this caliber to be at odds with the President, while our military is literally about to crack in two, and public support is rapidly deteriorating, this is something that is starting to smell like an electrical fire. Things could get really nasty.
JIM LEHRER: The whole point -- the Iraq Study Group people said their whole point was to try to arouse a consensus, in Congress and among the American people, to do about Iraq. Is that possible now?
DAVID BROOKS: You know, I thought more accurate display of the debate was a panel you had on a couple nights ago with six or eight different experts. I think Fred Kagan was there, Peter Galbraith and various other people. They disagreed. There is no consensus. A leader is going to have to pick one and not the other.
I just don't believe there is a consensus position. Those kind of panels work like, in Social Security, when there's basically already a consensus, you just need to build up political willpower. But on this there is no consensus. People are disagreeing.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Forget the fact that our entire occupation is illegal, and that most Iraqis don’t want us to stay. Leaving is not losing. Leaving is being moral. But try telling that to a warrior. They are so sad that the dead bodies they created didn’t add up to something. It didn’t. It can’t. It never will. I'm not so sure this who ordeal was about anything more than a powerstruggle between moderate right wingers and neocons. When the neocons start scaring their own, you know things are bad. But what I don't read on the front pages of any paper, is how all the left winger who have hated and feared Bush for many years, were all correct. The left was right. The right was wrong. Where is that admission? Come on David, you can be the first to say it.
JIM LEHRER: And I have to say good night to both of you.
Johnny, what are your thoughts about Donald Rumsfeld tonight?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He was nothing more than a defense contractor lobbyist put in charge of the piggy bank. He was allowed to invent any justification imaginable, so long as the money kept flowing. I’d say as a lobbyist who was supposed to maximize the profits of the largest private contractors, and he perfected the task. A huge pile of money was spent very quickly. While hundreds of thousands of dead people will go unnoticed in his path, he was surely worshipped by those defense contractor executives, who all soothe each other’s egos with false justifications for their immoral lives. And as you may have noticed, the soldiers in general don’t benefit from this spending. They are constantly shorted. But that’s because of the inescapable fact that the money flow is being maximized to the private sector. It’s a huge waste resources and power. So Rumsfeld might hold the number one spot as the fastest waster of power in the history of the world. He, like Bush, was handed more power than nearly anybody in history, and he squandered as much of it as he could. He may not know it, because he is so well indoctri-ego-nated, he believes most of his own bullshit.
JIM LEHRER: Does he deserve all the blame he's getting, David?
DAVID BROOKS: I do. I think he does deserve quite a lot of blame. I don't think he's a scapegoat.
I mean, I understood going into Baghdad and the first rush up with whatever he had, 130,000. What I don't understand was why he didn't adapt the number of troop levels after that. When it became clear to people in the White House, when it became clear to John McCain, when it became clear in what has become clear in every single book and article that's been written about what went wrong, there wasn't enough troops, and there was no order in society. Why he didn't adapt in May of '03, in June, in July? And more than that, why did he suppress any sort of debate that could have happened about that within the military? And he didn't.
And one of the things he did not do was cultivate a climate of open debate. So a lot of people within the military who privately held one opinion didn't say it, and maybe they should have. But it would have taken a lot of courage, and part of that was his fault.
And then the final thing I'd say about him -- and I agree he was the most well-qualified public servant maybe of our lifetime and the most destructive at the same time -- but the final thing I'd say about him -- and this he shares with, I think, a lot of people in the White House and in the Pentagon, was that he saw the war as killing bad guys and controlling territory. And as many essayists and reporters over there made clear, the enemy saw the war as controlling the narrative and winning the war of ideas. And they were playing a different game than we were, and they were beating us at it.
JIM LEHRER: Everybody says -- and I'm sure the two of you would agree -- that whatever else Donald Rumsfeld is, he's a very smart man. So all the things that you all have just outlined are not the actions of a smart man. So what happened?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I can’t believe you dared to say that. This is the dumbest administration this country has ever experienced. This is the most incredible congregation of ignorance I have ever witnessed. Rumsfeld is obviously not a smart man. Read the book Emotional Intelligence. Rumsfeld‘s emotional intelligence is at the level of retardation. Many criminals in our history are smart people. But they share one thing in common - emotional ignorance. Don’t confuse a guy’s ability to solve a calculus equation with a guy like Jesus or Ghandi, who can lead a million poor people to safety.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think that he sought out the guys who wouldn't speak up and wouldn't...
DAVID BROOKS: Every book, whether it's the Ricks' book, the Gordon book, every book underlines that. That's one of the things.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: America is constantly sold on the idea that we are strong enough to police the world to our will. That‘s even harder when our will has no moral authority behind the objectives. The world cannot be dominated by force. Leadership is not about the meanest guy in the room. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld think the world is a cold, cruel, crazy place that only listens to death and torture. It‘s a huge miscalculation about leadership and humanity. They have no clue about these things. An empire should never ever, ever reveal the full extend of it‘s power. The minute you do that, you have shown the entire world your limits and greatly weakened your hand. A truly wise leader will rule without ever having to use significant force. War does not mean glory. War means you were too stupid to work things out. War signifies failure. The Bush administration has no desire to resolve anything peacefully, which puts them in the same pile of trash as any violent dictatorship.
DAVID BROOKS: I do have a theory, because I think there is a straight line that goes through his career. He comes out of college in the '50s and '60s. The country had a lot of big bureaucracies. A smart guy comes out and says, "You know, we're getting fat."
JIM LEHRER: He was a Navy pilot.
DAVID BROOKS: Right.
JIM LEHRER: Which was a risk-taking business.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. And he says, "I'm not going to be an organization man. I'm going to streamline bureaucracies." He did it in the Nixon administration. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He did it at G.D. Searle. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He came to the Pentagon...
JIM LEHRER: That was a chemical company that made artificial sweeteners.
DAVID BROOKS: He became the CEO.
JIM LEHRER: Yes, exactly.
DAVID BROOKS: And then he came here and he decided to streamline a bureaucracy, with emphasizing technology over manpower. And there are many challenges for which that probably would have been the perfect solution. But occupying Iraq was not that challenge, and so he was mismatched to the problem.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I still say he was perfect for the task. He maximized war profits to the profiteers. Well done. Oh yeah, and there some people dyeing. Oh well. It’s complicated.
JIM LEHRER: And everything leading up to that has been, "Oh, no, we've got plenty of troops. We can do everything. We're not anywhere near cracking," and all of a sudden they're cracking.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The man is not capable of seeing his own failure.
DAVID BROOKS: The world changed, and what we've had when this decentralized sort of enemy is a different sort of enemy -- in some ways, to be fair to Rumsfeld, he was very cutting-edge on technological matters. He is not a stick in the mud, whatever you can accuse him of. He's not someone who believes in doing things the old-fashioned way.
But I don't think he quite -- and, to be fair, I'm not sure any of us quite guessed what is actually happening in the world and the kind of enemy we face. There are people in the Pentagon -- George Packer, in the New Yorker, current New Yorker, has an essay on this -- people within the Pentagon talking about the need for anthropologists to understand the culture of Iraq.
And that's something the Pentagon in general, and I think Rumsfeld in particular, had some trouble with.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I‘m not prepared to give an ounce of credit to any enemy. This is not anything new. We‘ve see it all before. We have talked about repeating Vietnam. Well, we did. We repeated Vietnam. It‘s the same damn thing, in every way.
DAVID BROOKS: Just one more thing to spread the blame a little, I mean, the relationship with Cheney is key. One little story that's I think in Bob Woodward's book, there's a woman named Meghan O'Sullivan, who was an Iraq expert. She was going to be involved in the postwar planning before the war.
Cheney and Rumsfeld got her removed from the planning, though she knows a lot about Iraq, because she was not on board, I think, with Chalabi, one of the people they wanted to install. She had a dissenting voice. She was kicked off, sidelined, and that sort of thing just sends a message.
And so, you know, Cheney was involved. And, to be fair, the president, for all this time, he's the boss, and he should have done something.
JIM LEHRER: Meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group, what's happened to it? And its recommendations, where are we with that, two weeks later?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: From what I‘ve heard, Bush is pissed off big time about what Baker did, and he‘s not about to give an inch to it. Bush is apparently a man on edge, hating just about everybody there is to hate.
JIM LEHRER: And having his own listening tour.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He‘s a cornered dog as the great journalist Doug Thompson will tell you. I agree.
DAVID BROOKS: He did take a year and a half to go to war. In any case, on the Iraq Study Group, I would say it is fading. The White House has not embraced it.
Certainly, talking to Iran they don't believe in. The Republicans in general don't think that the road to peace in Baghdad leads through Jerusalem. They just think that's a flawed strategy.
The Iraqis are certainly contemptuous of it; they certainly don't like it. And the Democrats have not embraced it; they've been sort of lukewarm about it.
So I think, when you look back on the lasting effect of the Iraq Study Group, I think it will have prolonged our presence in Iraq, because I think, after the election, people could have said, "The voters sent a message. Let's get out of Iraq."
Then you had the likes of Republican Senator Gordon Smith saying, "I'm at the end of my rope." Without the Iraq Study Group, you could really kind of brought kind of momentum, "We're out of here." But the Iraq Study Group froze the debate for a month, and then said, you know, slow, gradual withdrawal. And so I think, perversely, the end effect was to keep us there longer.
JIM LEHRER: You buy that?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know. It feels like there’s a civil war developing in the real base of power - which is literally within the Republican party. This Baker group thing was rather incredible, and their slap in Bush’s face in public was also very incredible. This outdoes Stephen Colbert big time. And now Bush is blowing it off as nonsense. That was a very unwise move, because he’s not just blowing off some commission. He’s blowing off some of the very center of world power. For people of this caliber to be at odds with the President, while our military is literally about to crack in two, and public support is rapidly deteriorating, this is something that is starting to smell like an electrical fire. Things could get really nasty.
JIM LEHRER: The whole point -- the Iraq Study Group people said their whole point was to try to arouse a consensus, in Congress and among the American people, to do about Iraq. Is that possible now?
DAVID BROOKS: You know, I thought more accurate display of the debate was a panel you had on a couple nights ago with six or eight different experts. I think Fred Kagan was there, Peter Galbraith and various other people. They disagreed. There is no consensus. A leader is going to have to pick one and not the other.
I just don't believe there is a consensus position. Those kind of panels work like, in Social Security, when there's basically already a consensus, you just need to build up political willpower. But on this there is no consensus. People are disagreeing.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Forget the fact that our entire occupation is illegal, and that most Iraqis don’t want us to stay. Leaving is not losing. Leaving is being moral. But try telling that to a warrior. They are so sad that the dead bodies they created didn’t add up to something. It didn’t. It can’t. It never will. I'm not so sure this who ordeal was about anything more than a powerstruggle between moderate right wingers and neocons. When the neocons start scaring their own, you know things are bad. But what I don't read on the front pages of any paper, is how all the left winger who have hated and feared Bush for many years, were all correct. The left was right. The right was wrong. Where is that admission? Come on David, you can be the first to say it.
JIM LEHRER: And I have to say good night to both of you.
posted by Johnny Flatline at 9:03 PM
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