Reconstructing Incompetence

First, something you probably already know: it is now official, the president is incompetent. After two and a half years of trying to figure out how to organize an unplanned reconstruction effort, his own Inspector General reported yesterday that the process is still marked 'by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy.' The anti-imperialists out there would do well to consider how an imperial power could make so little effort to plan out the various scenarious and guarantee its interests, especially since the so-called neoconservatives had allegedly been preparing for this war ever since the US pulled up short of the Iraqi border in 1991. Contrast that with FDR, who began planning every aspect of German reconstruction in 1941, and you have to admit, we're dealing with something different, which old slogans don't quite fit.

Some further evidence, that may have escaped your attention: reconstruction blues are not just a foreign affair. The recent Medicare shenanigans suggest Bush is even more incapable of implementing his will at home. Since Bush's signature domestic reform took effect on January 1, there has been such substantial confusion and mishap that 'at least 25 states and the District have had to defray the costs to seniors that [Medicare reform] was supposed to cover'. Specific examples of chaos include 20 percent of California's Medicaid recipients losing coverage, and Maine's state assistance line logging 18,000 calls by January 3. Again, a historical example illustrates the scope of the failure to plan. When LBJ created Medicare--that's right, created it from scratch--he planned for all kinds of contingencies amongst a complex environment that included requiring hospitals to conform with civil rights legislation, and limited hospital capacity. As Jonathan Cohn reports in this illuminating New Republic piece, LBJ had helicopters in place to ferry patients from overloaded hospitals to ones with spare capacity and he had the program start in the summer, when hospital demand is the lowest. In the end, newspaper headlines read 'MEDICARE TAKES OVER EASILY'.

The relevance for our immediate political concerns is this: incompetence is an accurate description of what we're dealing with, but the deeper point is that we are facing an arbitrary power. It is arbitray not in the sense that it is unregulated, but in the sense that it has little sense of its long-term interests. This is not specific to Bush. Clinton's presidency, too, was famously about crisis-managment. He may have been somewhat better at it than Bush, but as a strategic actor, he was still unpredictable, cooking up foreign and domestic policy as he went along. In a peculiar way, this makes the task of opposition more difficult. There was a certain solidity and straightforwardness to the anti-imperialist line of the past, which makes it seductive but also probably wrong. Critiquing bunglers is in certain ways more difficult than more calculating enemies.