May 6, 2004

Chastising rumsfeld II

Jane Galt has stirred up a hornet's nest of disagreement with this call for rummies resignation:

the only way to repair the damage is for responsibility to be taken at the highest levels. And not the fake "I'm accountable but I'm not going to, y'know, be called to account" responsibility of Janet Reno, but real, honest to God, "Somethine went wrong on my watch, and I will suffer the penalty" responsibility. For the good of his country, it is time for Don Rumsfeld to go.
Her commenters are near unanimous in their disagreement and there is a lot of other disagreement as well, e.g., James Joyner. I certainly agree with Jane that responsibility must be taken to the highest levels (see previous post) and I'm sure you can find others who agree with one aspect or another of her call.

One of the arguments that has been made against the call for resignation is that cabinet heads like rummie are too far away from the action to be held accountable though both Skippy (via the Progress Report) and the Washington Post call this into question with respect to rummie.

Brian Doss also works through this argument and ultimately comes to the conclusion that there just might be a positive light at the end of his executive hari kari discussion. Long quote follows:

This reminds me of the tendency of Japanese executives to ‘fall on their swords’ whenever something embarassing happened to the company (product recall, spectacular accident, stock value drops, etc), which at the time struck me as odd. The CEO didn’t do the embarassing thing (usually, in the case of Japanese CEO self-firing), and usually didnt have anything to do with the process that caused the problem. But, upon reflection, CEOs are there as public faces of their organizations and so in some ways it can be seen as their duty to sacrifice themselves to propitiate the gods of the marketplace when trouble occurs.

Extending this idea to the Executive branch of the US government, what if every department head and secretary resigned whenever their minions did something stupid and/or their policies failed in a very public way. We couldn’t have that, since that would mean a constant shuffling of new heads and secretaries every few days, which would mean pandemonium and chaos; nothing could get done at any federal agency due to the constant shakeups.

Er, wait. Hmmm…

Yep, these are agencies best not doing much of anything and in this Iraq case I think rummie and his boss had a lot to do with the process that caused the problem.

Posted by Steve on May 6, 2004
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