Lounsbury: Zakaria and Iraq

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August 18, 2004

Zakaria and Iraq

Interesting op ed which I wil write about in the place of reading more about steel companies. You know, I have come to dislike steel companies, but more on that at a later date.

Let me direct you to

Why Kerry Is Right About Iraq
By Fareed Zakaria
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6678-2004Aug16.html

First this passage I enjoyed:
The more intelligent question is (given what we knew at the time): Was toppling Hussein's regime a worthwhile objective? Bush's answer is yes; Howard Dean's is no. Kerry's answer is that it was a worthwhile objective but was disastrously executed. For this "nuance" Kerry has been attacked from both the right and the left. But it happens to be the most defensible position on the subject.

Now, on to the part I very much thought important and useful:
Bush's position is that if Kerry agrees with him that Hussein was a problem, then Kerry agrees with his Iraq policy. Doing something about Iraq meant doing what Bush did. But is that true? Did the United States have to go to war before the weapons inspectors had finished their job? Did it have to junk the U.N. process? Did it have to invade with insufficient troops to provide order and stability in Iraq? Did it have to occupy a foreign country with no cover of legitimacy from the world community? Did it have to ignore the State Department's postwar planning? Did it have to pack the Iraqi Governing Council with unpopular exiles, disband the army and engage in radical de-Baathification? Did it have to spend a fraction of the money allocated for Iraqi reconstruction -- and have that be mired in charges of corruption and favoritism? Was all this an inevitable consequence of dealing with the problem of Saddam Hussein?

Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there's a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.

"Strategy is execution," Louis Gerstner, former chief executive of IBM, American Express and RJR Nabisco, has often remarked. In fact, it's widely understood in the business world that having a good objective means nothing if you implement it badly. "Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they're pointless," writes Larry Bossidy, former chief executive of Honeywell.

Bossidy has written a book titled "Execution," which is worth reading in this context. Almost every requirement he lays out was ignored by the Bush administration in its occupation of Iraq. One important example: "You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue -- one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor and informality," Bossidy writes. "Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. You cannot set realistic goals until you've debated the assumptions behind them."

Say this in the business world and it is considered wisdom. But say it as a politician and it is derided as "nuance" or "sophistication." Perhaps that's why Washington works as poorly as it does.

I think Zakaria has made important points here, and I think ones that have substantially dovetailed with my own observations.

For all that the current President in Washington DC is of supposed CEO background, his operative form has been rather poor. (As an aside, what comes to mind just now is an FT piece on Donald Trump that comments snidely but accurately (and I paraphrase) that anyone can build a reputation as a great businessman when their businesses actually succeed, but to do so when their businesses demonstrably do not takes real genuis. We perhaps overlook a certain genuis in Ibn Bush.)

The failures, as I have insisted again and again, in Iraq, have been ones of choice and poor execution from sheer and willful blindness. From believing one's own agitprop.

August 18, 2004

Zakaria and Iraq

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