Bush's Crisis of "Competence"

Jim Hoagland in today's Washington Post draws the analogy between the erosion of public trust in Putin and in Bush. He reminds us that both set out to protect national security by strengthening executive power, and that each effort has resulted in brutality and general incompetence. For Hoagland, the lesson is that state power under conditions of globalization necessarily "fragments or atrophies" and that efficient leadership requires less hierarchy and greater flexibility. In calling for leadership that understands the limits of state power and can act accordingly, Hoagland virtually parrots David Ignatius's piece in the wake of Katrina called "The Party of Performance." There, Ignatius argued that the failure of the Bush Administration was also ultimately a failure of competence, and that rather than ideological bluster what Americans needed now was political efficiency. Self-consciously non-ideological, Ignatius saw himself as linking hands with none other than Newt Gingrich in calling for "performance" over rhetoric.

Yet, the emerging conventional wisdom that the Administration's incompetence is the real problem is question begging for two reasons. First, it suggests that somehow if policies were carried out with rigorous efficiency they would therefore be just. Fareed Zakaria, who has been engaged in an intellectual dance regarding the Iraq War ever since his own initial support, writes in Newsweek that Bush needs to learn from his mistakes in Iraq -- with mistake number one being that he tried to occupy a country with only 140,000 troops. You would think that rather than post-war planning, mistake number one was the occupation itself and the notion of imposing democracy from above. What this focus on competence ignores is that one can do many very bad things with a high degree of efficiency, and unless we have a sense of whether those policies are right or wrong performance will never be an adequate measure of political legitimacy.

Yet, the critique from competence also blinds Hoagland specifically to just what makes Bush and Putin so similar; namely the end of the Cold War. Both are presidents of massive security states which have lost their raison d'etre. The collapse of communism as a meaningful adversary/alternative means that each country has been forced to reassess its own political goals and objectives -- with little besides national security and terrorism filling the ideological gap. Under such circumstances, it's as if executive strength and the very assertion of power itself have been projected as stand-ins for the lack of a real national purpose.

This basic emptiness helps explain why the Administration and its Russian twin have been so incompetent. When political elites and the state institutions they run lose ideological grounding, it's very difficult to perform competently. Instead, they are left with a morass of policies that are generally self-contradictory and that, rather than guide events, simply respond to them. So, the Bush administration builds permanent bases in Iraq just as it's frantically trying to draw down troops -- or spends three years fighting a Sunni insurgency and now wonders if that very insurgency should be backed against Shia opponents. Without ideological purpose, it's hard to behave competently, and when you have neither purpose nor competence, it's even harder to find your way out of the fog.