Three Learning Methods for Statesmen vs. a Wilderness of Failure and Discouragement

That's a good one. Two or three years ago, a number of officers said that we need more troops in Iraq. Rumsfeld said sorry, you can't have them. Now Bush says he wants to put deploy tens of thousands more troops in Baghdad. A number of officers have said they don't think that's such a good idea. Bush replies, you're going to get them anyway.

A qualifier is helpful here. I don't know if Rumsfeld actually turned down a formal request for troops. He didn't have to. He was known to brush people off. He was known to bite people's heads off. Everyone knew what he did to Shinseki. No high-ranking officer saw the point of early retirement from a certain-to-fail campaign to persuade Rumsfeld to give up on his pet project. Rumsfeld was going to have his high-tech victory in Iraq, but he never recognized how utterly he failed. No military officer was going to change his mind, so no military officer tried.

So what can explain the current belief that 20,000 more ground troops in Baghdad can save the day? A caller to a radio program said this is lunacy. Yes, sometimes you have to state what's obvious, or perhaps overstate what's obvious. One thing that's obvious is that Bush doesn't know what he's doing. I said to a colleague that trial and error is the most efficient way to learn something. That presumes, though, that the learner can learn from mistakes. Bush hasn't learned from his mistakes or from anything else. He seems incapable of any learning at all, no matter what the method.

Another learning method in foreign policy is to talk to lots of people. Gather lots of information. Some of the people you talk to are friendly voices. They're on your side, or they have similar goals. Others are more neutral. They don't have direct interests at play, and they're trained to see both sides of issues. Still others are your rivals, or even your enemies. You try to gather a lot of information about them, too, and when conditions are right, you try to negotiate with them. Direct negotiations are an outstanding way to gather information about people who aren't friendly to your interests.

Bush doesn't talk to anybody except his close circle of advisors, who, during his first term anyway, were afflicted with the worst case of groupthink anyone has seen in government for a long time. He doesn't negotiate. He sets up a commission that studies the issues for nine months, then ignores almost all of their recommendations. What was his motive in having the commission do all that work in the first place? We can't trust anything he does. He has no grounds to ask for it.

A third learning method for a leader engaged in foreign policy is to simply to think problems through. Reflect. You might reflect on mistakes and their implications. You might reflect on the information you've gathered and how it fits together. You talk with others, this time not so much to gather information but to see how your ideas sound when you get them outside of your head. You write a lot of notes, and you turn your notes into speeches and memos and more notes. These thinking processes usually go in fits and starts. Like the other two learning methods, it's a method that's not so methodical. It involves both synthesis and analysis. Your mind has to be ready for it, and it doesn't happen all at once. The result of such thinking is understanding, even if it's only partial understanding. The purpose of understanding is to form a strategy, even if the strategy is a type of trial and error.

Bush can't do this kind of thinking. We know from his speeches and his actions that he can't. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, and if you don't know that, you don't know anything. Confucious said that the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. Bush can't seem to grasp this starting point, so the rest of his thinking is ungrounded. It's not connected to reality. So he can't make plans that achieve what he wants to achieve.

Successful statesmanship isn't easy. Even people who are good at it fail frequently. Failure has the usual positive outcome, though, when someone is competent. Most of us know when we have failed, and we don't like it. We try to act in such a way that when we fail again, it's for different reasons. That way we can keep learning. Bush doesn't have these qualities. Bush goes from failure to failure without knowing the damage he has caused. That doesn't mean he's an idiot. It does mean he doesn't have the qualities or the skills required for statesmanship or leadership in a war.

Once again: Bush is not stupid. A lot of people who don't like him still think he is. At the same time, he's not intelligent. Intelligence means being curious, and exercising the basic analytical skills we've been talking about. Bush is callow and he's shrewd. Because he's callow he's immature, and because he's shrewd he has a great deal of political intelligence. He also has a lot of discipline, and a lot of energy. Marry discipline and energy to shrewdness about people and politics, and you have a combination that can win elections. Shrewdness can help you be a good statesman, too, but it's pretty far down the ladder of essential qualities for statesmen. So we have an incompetent president, and a country led to ruin through eight years of the worst governance we have ever had.

It's time to sign off now, don't you think. But I have to make my last point one more time. We have to find new leadership. Ghandi and King had great impact as leaders, and they weren't elected to any political offices. We have an election coming upin 2008, and we may find the leaders we need through that process. But we shouldn't rely only on that process. We have to find any leader who is courageous, and who has the skills and qualities needed to bring us of this wilderness of failure and discouragement.