These questions came to the fore this summer on both sides of the Atlantic. In Great Britain, a Home Office rocked by turmoil over immigration engaged in an unseemly bout of finger-pointing between politicians and civil servants. In Washington, the military and intelligence establishment took off after the Bush Administration, terrified lest political leadership in Iran repeated the disaster of Iraq.
Let's start with Great Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair fired Home Secretary Charles Clarke after news broke that somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand illegal immigrants, who had been convicted of serious crimes, had been released back into society instead of being deported. Needless to say, this was a tabloid newspaper's dream story (and Great Britain has many of them).Upon taking over, the new home secretary, Jack Reid, took on the civil service, vowing that he would not "defend the indefensible" and that he would fire people who didn't improve. He went on to say that the system, "... is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of scope, information technology, leadership, management, systems and processes."
The head of the civil servants' association fought back, accusing the politicians of laziness and incompetence and adding that Reid's tactics were especially bad because civil servants are not allowed to fight back. From their point of view, brave civil servants had been working 18-hour days to clear the asylum backlog and had been trying for years to blow the whistle on a shambles of an immigration system. It was the Blair government, they pointed out, especially Blair's wife Cherrie, that had lobbied for passage of a human-rights law that made deportation especially difficult.
As the battle between politicians and civil servants in the Home Office raged, another battle raged in Washington, between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and generals in the U.S. military. In May, a group of retired generals called for Rumsfeld's resignation over his conduct concerning the war in Iraq. Writing in Government Executive, James Kitfield called the controversy, "the worst breach in civil-military relations since Harry Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur...." In calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, the generals put forth a long list of decisions they felt had gone wrong, from the initial failure on weapons of mass destruction to McNamara-like micromanagement of the war to the decision to disband Iraq's army. In every instance, it's hard to draw the line between policy and implementation. In fact, the two are inexorably linked.
The battle between Rumsfeld and the generals continued into the summer, with generals and other Pentagon planners telling the journalist Seymour Hersh that a bombing campaign in Iran would not work. The battle inside the Pentagon over Iran is spilling out into the public realm, with military officials desperate to avoid in Iran the mistakes of Iraq. Like the British civil servants in the Home Office, they are talking out of school so much so that one journalist told me: "I don't even have to do my job any more and dig up sources -- I just read the e-mails that come in."
In both cases, there is a breakdown in trust and cooperation between those who occupy the "permanent government" -- civil servants and military officers -- and their political masters. The civil servants feel that their advice is not heeded. The politicians feel that the permanent government undermines them with poor performance and with disloyalty. They are all right and they are all wrong.
Going back to our original questions, -what these two cases from the summer of 2006 remind us of is that there is no clear line between implementation and policy. In war especially, implementation turns out to be equally if not more important than the reason for going in in the first place. Think Vietnam, now Iraq. Secondly, the civil servant or career military official has the responsibility to use their greater expertise in order to make politicians aware of the consequences of their actions. But, as an American intelligence officer once said to me, "You can guide a president to intelligence but you can't make him think." That's why, in the end, accountability does lie with the political class -- they can be blamed more easily and punished more readily than the faceless civil service. But that doesn't exonerate the permanent government. What is the point of job security and freedom from political interference if not the freedom to speak truth to power?
Good governance starts with a quality relationship between the permanent government and political leaders. Unfortunately, this summer, it was badly frayed on both sides of the Atlantic.
