The Decider

I come from a family made up of some pretty indecisive wishy-washy people. Its the couple of more powerful players in the family who have always made quick and strong decisions, with the surety of those who have no concept of consequences who have effected my life pretty badly. The consequences of some of those decisions have echoed and have mnade me very wary of overly decisive people.
So, between my sister trying to decide of she should buy a shirt at Banana Republic and my father deciding that maybe losing my apartment would be a good experience, I'm a little on the fence. I am a pretty decisive person myself, but I know the consequences of bad decisions. Decision makeing is scary and its important. It envolves empathy, which is not something that many people have mastered. It also involves experience, and I find even myself pretending that Iknow things that I really dont sometimes...Hell, in the film business, thats how I survived!
I am currently living with some of my own pretty bad decisions regarding not caring much to shop around for house fixtures because I was overwhelmed with taking care of my baby son alone while rebuilding a falling down neglected house. At least those were my decisons effecting only me.
Its not the colors or shirts or even the too small for a human being bathtub and every cheap home depot fixture that is breaking exactly 5 years later, that worry me.
Its the decisions that really effect other people's lives...And the things that we are asking of our children in the future, that are on my mind. Our parents might have come out of a more innocent time socially, but politically it was a pretty complicated time. Maybe the information age has added a level of removal from the real life flesh and blood of things, but its also made so much more information about the rest of the world available. So, those decisions that effect millions of people in Iraq or Africa come spinning back in full color pictures to haunt us. Do the people of America really need to see starving people on our own streets...or floating bodies... to get a clue?
Here we are with an administration that lacks even the basics of empathy for the human condition and uses ideology as a tool to shape the world into some misled divine prophesy based on strange mysticism and tea readers. Its really that bad. W is so removed from reality as to be useless as anything more than a mouthpiece for the criminally insane.
It makes me very nervous when someone so boldly makes decisions and then wont take responsibility for them unless really pressed to do so. I guess I was the victim of rash decisions growing up and to see that happening again with no thought to the aftermath really scares me.



April 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Decider Sticks With the Derider
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

At first Rummy was reluctant to talk about the agonizing generals' belated objections to the irrational and bullying decisions that led to carnage in Iraq. The rebellious retired brass complain that the defense chief was contemptuous of advice from his military officers and sabotaged the Iraq mission with willful misjudgments before and after the invasion.

"I kind of would prefer to let a little time walk over it," Rummy told reporters at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. But seconds later, he let loose a river of ruminations, a Shakespearean, or maybe Nixonian, soliloquy that showed such a breathtaking lack of comprehension that it was touching, in a perverse way.

He flailed and floundered through anecdotes from his first and second stints at the Pentagon, arguing that he drew criticism because he was a change agent, trying to transform the lumbering military bureaucracy.

He talked about things that most people wouldn't understand — how 30 years ago he chose a M-1 battle tank with a 120-millimeter cannon and turbine engine instead of the 105-howitzer and diesel engine the Army had wanted. He babbled on about reforms in the Unified Command Plan, the Defense Logistics System, the Quadrennial Defense Reviews and the National Security Personnel System and about going from "service-centric war fighting to deconfliction war fighting, to interoperability and now towards interdependence."

When you yank the military from the 20th-century industrial age to the 21st-century information age, Rummy said, you're bound to cause "a lot of ruffles."

Asked why he twice offered to resign during the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal but has not this time, Rummy smiled and replied, "Oh, just call it idiosyncratic."

Idiosyncratic, indeed, with Iraq in chaos, the military riven and depleted, the president poleaxed, the Republican fortunes for the midterm elections dwindling, and Republican lawmakers like Chuck Hagel questioning Rummy's leadership and Democratic ones like Dick Durbin proposing a no-confidence vote in the Senate.

The secretary made it sound as if the generals want him to resign because he made reforms. But they really want him to resign because he made gigantic, horrible, arrogant mistakes that will be taught in history classes forever.

He suggested invading Iraq the day after 9/11. He didn't want to invade Iraq because it was connected to 9/11. That was the part his neocon aides at the Pentagon, Wolfie and Doug Feith, had to concoct. Rummy wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would be easy, compared with Iran or North Korea, or compared with finding Osama. He could do it cheap and show off his vaunted transformation of the military into a sleek, lean fighting force.

Cloistered in a macho monastery with "The Decider" (as W. calls himself), Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, Rummy didn't want to hear dissent, or worries about Iraq, the tribes, the sects, the likelihood of insurgency or civil war, the need for more troops and armor to quell postwar eruptions.

"He didn't worry about the culture in Iraq," said Bernard Trainor, the retired Marine general who is my former colleague and the co-author of "Cobra II." "He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank. He could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn't care, as long as he could send the message that you don't mess with Hopalong Cassidy. He wanted to do to Saddam in the Middle East what he did to Shinseki in the Pentagon, make him an example, say, 'I'm in charge, don't mess with me.' "

The stoic Gen. Eric Shinseki finally spoke to Newsweek, conceding he had seen a former classmate wearing a cap emblazoned with "RIC WAS RIGHT" at West Point last fall. He said only that the Pentagon had "a lot of turmoil" before the invasion.

Just as with Vietnam, when L.B.J. and Robert McNamara were running the war, or later, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over, we now have leaders obsessed with not seeming weak, or losing face. Their egos are feeding their delusions.

Asked by Rush Limbaugh on Monday about progress in Iraq, Rummy replied, "Well, the progress has been good." He said that if you always listened to critics about war, "we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War" or World War I or World War II, and America would have been a different country "if it existed at all."

But the conscience-stricken generals are not critics of war. They are critics of having a war run by a 73-year-old who thinks he's a force for modernity when he's really a force for fantasy. It's time to change the change agent.




Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company