[Mb-civic] Richard Cohen The Presidential Medals of Failure

[Kevin Walz]

Presidential Medals of Failure
By Richard Cohen

  Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page A37



  Where's Kerik?

  This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of 
the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my 
computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and 
the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that 
Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. 
Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army 
and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing 
mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired 
Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States 
sent too few troops to Iraq.

  One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue 
velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each 
now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good 
people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding 
such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their 
book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of 
his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)

  I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire 
process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic 
admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated 
failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not 
performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty 
and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.

  "Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.

  Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.

  "You're a good man," the president said.

  It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be 
nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president 
liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of 
youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the 
starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an 
elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy 
Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man 
hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.

  Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have 
asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made 
that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist 
attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what 
has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass 
destruction in Iraq.

  As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both 
deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United 
States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on 
the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers 
in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after 
Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, 
Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough 
troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.

  The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had 
a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and 
failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The 
War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held 
accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He 
admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The 
terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, 
are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was 
warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?

  To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American 
death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility 
of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden 
and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the 
creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals 
and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three 
months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it 
-- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal 
as any of the others.

  Maybe next year.



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