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 nce upon a time,
civil servants resigned when they had manifestly failed in their
mission, and political appointees
routinely
handed in their resignations when a new administration took office.
No one had to tell them about two basic principles of good government:
When you make a major blunder, you take responsibility for it.
And when the party that gave you your job gets beaten, you're beaten
too, so clean out your desk.
No more. Now they all stay on until someone higher up tells them
to ship out.
I'm thinking, for example, about Martin Indyk, still hanging on
as ambassador to Israel. Indyk is one of the masterminds of the
awful mess that was Clinton's Middle East policy, and a particularly
meddlesome ambassador (he openly campaigned for Barak in the last
Israeli elections). That makes him a two-fer: both a political
appointee of the last administration, and an architect of a failed
policy. He should have resigned long since, and rejoined the chattering
class from which he came. Instead, he has remained in place, and
just the other day delivered himself of yet another sermon to the
Israelis about how they should behave. There are lots of these
lame-duck ambassadors around, shopping for jobs, collecting favors,
pronouncing on this and that, pretending to speak for the new administration,
or, like our man Foglietta in Rome, publicly bemoaning the defeat
of his buddy Al Gore.
I'm also thinking about Louis Freeh. He's a good man, but any FBI
director who fails for five years to detect a high-level KGB penetration
of his agency really must go. If not, all semblance of accountability
is gone.
But no one resigns as a matter of principle, so they have to be
fired. This is not entirely bad news, for it permits our new president
to show that he well understands the answer to Machiavelli's first
question for all leaders: Is it better to be more loved than feared,
or more feared than loved? The winning answer is: Both can work,
but fear is much more reliable. A new president who wields his
personnel scythe
| “Just
as Ronald Reagan's purge of the air controllers showed
he was a real leader who would not shrink from a fight,
a good old-fashioned purge by the new administration will
do wonders for the loyalty of its bureaucrats.” |
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with abandon sends a message through the entire bureaucracy, with
all kinds of positive ripple effects. Just as Ronald Reagan's purge
of the air controllers showed he was a real leader who would not
shrink from a fight, a good old-fashioned purge by the new administration
will do wonders for the loyalty of its bureaucrats. George W. Bush
should tell all the political ambassadors to submit their resignations,
and turn the embassies over to their professional deputies. Replacements
can be appointed in the fullness of time.
All the heads of our intelligence services should be fired, on the
grounds that it took us 15 years to realize there was a KGB agent
at the highest levels of the intelligence community. And all the
political and military heads of the military services should be
fired, since they cooperated in the relentless degradation of our
power conducted by Clinton, Cohen and the others.
Indeed, Bush should simply remove all the political appointees
of the Clintons. True, a few good people will fall along with those
who enthusiastically supported the last administration, but on balance
Bush — and the country — will come out way ahead. As
things stand, there are hundreds of Clintonians at high levels of
the system, still pushing the policies that Bush and Cheney campaigned
against, from the environmental whackos issuing ukases to institutionalize
the Kyoto Treaty to the radical feminazis still clamoring for "gender
equity" in all walks of life, to foreign-policy types on the National
Security Council Staff and throughout State, CIA, and Defense, who
are still trying to create Bill Clinton's legacy in the Middle East,
or deliver Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, or hamstring
the Iraqi National Congress despite congressional insistence that
it be fully supported.
Some will worry that a full-blown purge will weaken the government,
and they will argue that it is best to leave the current officials
in place until their successors can be named. I see that "weakening"
as one of the many benefits of the purge. Life may be better, indeed
far better, with fewer men and women busily finding things for the
government to do. If that is not compassionate conservatism, what
is?
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