Stephen Walt writes October 3, 2014:
Something unusual happened in Washington, D.C., this week: A federal official was fired ("resigned under pressure") for doing her job badly. I refer to former Secret Service chief Julia Pierson, who stepped down after a series of embarrassing revelations, most notably the recent incident during which an intruder managed to scale the fence, get across the grounds, and then get all the way inside the White House. And the Secret Service couldn’t even get its version of events straight for several days.
But the remarkable thing about Pierson’s departure is how rare something like this is. Politicians and government bureaucrats are sometimes ousted over a sex scandal, embezzlement, or bribery, or for saying something that is wildly inappropriate, but they rarely get fired for just doing their jobs poorly, especially in the realm of foreign and national security policy. This inadvertent form of job security may help explain why U.S. foreign policy hasn’t performed very well in recent decades, and it may also explain why some major foreign-policy endeavors — such as reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — have been plagued by mismanagement and billions of squandered dollars.
For starters, take George W. Bush’s administration (please!). Its foreign policy was mostly a train wreck — 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza, a declining global image, Abu Ghraib, the torture regime, North Korea’s nuclear test, the failure to find Osama bin Laden, etc. — but the architects of all these failures kept their jobs for years. In those days, the only people who lost their jobs were folks who pointed out the cliffs Bush was steering toward — such as economic advisor Larry Lindsey.
Donald Rumsfeld was one of the least competent defense secretaries since the post was created, yet he remained in place into Bush’s second term. Bush thought it was a good idea to hire convicted (and pardoned) Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams to run Middle East policy at the White House, only to watch as Abrams helped engineer an ill-fated coup in Gaza that left Hamas in charge. Bush also thought it made sense to have Gen. Tommy Franks command the invasion of Iraq, even though Franks’s flawed command over U.S. forces in Afghanistan had allowed bin Laden to evade capture in 2001.
The list goes on. Paul Wolfowitz’s performance as deputy secretary of defense was woefully deficient (as was his optimistic forecast that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself), but that didn’t stop Bush from nominating him to be president of the World Bank. (Making matters worse, Wolfowitz was neither an economist nor a development expert and left the bank after two years amid a flurry of accusations about ethics violations.) Condoleezza Rice was by most accounts a failure as Bush’s national security advisor, yet he promoted her to be secretary of state in his second term. And so on.
Barack Obama’s administration is scarcely better on this score, however. To be sure, Dennis Blair did not last long as Obama’s initial director of central intelligence, and neither did national security advisor James Jones. But both men departed because they never found their footing inside Obama’s highly politicized White House, not because of any obvious policy failures. Obama also fired Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal for indiscreet (that is, insubordinate) remarks to a Rolling Stone reporter, and Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki took the fall following embarrassing revelations about deficient care at Veteran Affairs hospitals.
But the number of officials let go for poor job performance is small, and even dramatic failures don’t seem to have much (any?) impact on prominent foreign-policy careers. By most accounts, Samantha Power and Susan Rice led the charge behind the ill-advised U.S. decision to topple Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya; the result is a failed state there, yet both women received important new posts in Obama’s second term. Director of Central Intelligence James Clapper has admitted to misleading (i.e., lying to) Congress regarding the National Security Agency’s surveillance, yet Obama has kept him in his post. CIA chief John Brennan has displayed even more impressive Teflon-like qualities: Obama apparently still retains "full confidence" in him despite his prior role in Bush-era torture, his false or misleading statements about various CIA activities, and his declining public support. And it’s not like the CIA has doing such a great job in its principal mission — providing intelligence — given its failure to anticipate a) the Arab Spring, b) Russia’s response to events in Ukraine, or c) the recent emergence of the Islamic State. One might also ask why the geniuses who helped provoke the crisis in Ukraine still have their jobs too, but that’s another story.
What’s going on here? Why is there so little accountability in the conduct of foreign policy? (This problem also applies to the punditocracy, of course. How else to explain why so many commentators who have been repeatedly and tragically wrong somehow retain positions of prominence inside the U.S. foreign-policy establishment)…
Fifth, lack of vigorous accountability is also an artifact of America’s dominant global position. It isn’t good when U.S. foreign policy fails, and it does involve real costs (especially to others). But none of the mistakes of the past 20 years — and there have been some real doozies — has left the United States open to invasion or even at much risk of a genuine threat to Americans’ way of life. If pressed, I might even argue that the 2008 financial collapse did more to harm to America than any single foreign policy screw-up. Because the United States is so powerful and so secure, it can fail big time in lots of places and still end up mostly OK. When this is the case, however, the need to bring in the A Team and let it do its job will decline.
There is a final reason that accountability is rare. Members of the foreign-policy elite are often reluctant to hold each other to account because they know that it may eventually be their turn in the cross-hairs. "Judge not, lest ye be judged" is a sound career principle for foreign-policy insiders, and it encourages them to pull their punches when dealing with their counterparts’ failings. Really big and visible mistakes can’t be ignored and will have professional consequences, but even these errors tend to be forgiven over time.
