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Jewish World Review March 9, 2001 / 14 Adar, 5761
Michael Ledeen
No more. Now they all stay on until someone higher up tells
them to ship out.
I'm thinking, for example, about Martin Indyk, still hanging on
as ambassador to Israel. Indyk is one of the masterminds of
the awful mess that was Clinton's Middle East policy, and a
particularly meddlesome ambassador (he openly campaigned
for Barak in the last Israeli elections). That makes him a
two-fer: both a political appointee of the last administration,
and an architect of a failed policy. He should have resigned
long since, and rejoined the chattering class from which he
came. Instead, he has remained in place, and just the other
day delivered himself of yet another sermon to the Israelis
about how they should behave. There are lots of these
lame-duck ambassadors around, shopping for jobs, collecting
favors, pronouncing on this and that, pretending to speak for
the new administration, or, like our man Foglietta in Rome,
publicly bemoaning the defeat of his buddy Al Gore.
I'm also thinking about Louis Freeh. He's a good man, but
any FBI director who fails for five years to detect a high-level
KGB penetration of his agency really must go. If not, all
semblance of accountability is gone.
But no one resigns as a matter of principle, so they have to be
fired. This is not entirely bad news, for it permits our new
president to show that he well understands the answer to
Machiavelli's first question for all leaders: Is it better to be
more loved than feared, or more feared than loved? The
winning answer is: Both can work, but fear is much more
reliable.
A new president who wields his personnel scythe
with abandon sends a message
through the entire bureaucracy,
with all kinds of positive ripple
effects. Just as Ronald
Reagan's purge of the air
controllers showed he was a
real leader who would not
shrink from a fight, a good
old-fashioned purge by the new
administration will do wonders
for the loyalty of its
bureaucrats. George W. Bush
should tell all the political
ambassadors to submit their
resignations, and turn the
embassies over to their
professional deputies. Replacements can be appointed in the
fullness of time.
All the heads of our intelligence services should be fired, on
the grounds that it took us 15 years to realize there was a
KGB agent at the highest levels of the intelligence
community. And all the political and military heads of the
military services should be fired, since they cooperated in the
relentless degradation of our power conducted by Clinton,
Cohen and the others.
Indeed, Bush should simply remove all the political
appointees of the Clintons. True, a few good people will fall
along with those who enthusiastically supported the last
administration, but on balance Bush — and the country —
will come out way ahead. As things stand, there are
hundreds of Clintonians at high levels of the system, still
pushing the policies that Bush and Cheney campaigned
against, from the environmental whackos issuing ukases to
institutionalize the Kyoto Treaty to the radical feminazis still
clamoring for "gender equity" in all walks of life, to
foreign-policy types on the National Security Council Staff
and throughout State, CIA, and Defense, who are still trying
to create Bill Clinton's legacy in the Middle East, or deliver
Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, or hamstring the
Iraqi National Congress despite congressional insistence that
it be fully supported.
Some will worry that a full-blown purge will weaken the
government, and they will argue that it is best to leave the
current officials in place until their successors can be named.
I see that "weakening" as one of the many benefits of the
purge. Life may be better, indeed far better, with fewer men
and women busily finding things for the government to do. If
that is not compassionate conservatism, what
03/06/00: Powell’s great (mis)adventure
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