LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

How System Attributes Trumped Leadership
icized, much more partisan. The strident and often vitriolic language on
both sides of the debate made such discourse difficult, if not impossible.
The media were just an amplifier for this partisan discourse. . . . Our
national security debate has to be elevated. 315
Perhaps worse than the partisan politics is the tendency of senior leaders
to position themselves to be able to blame others for poor outcomes. The early
fault-finding over intelligence warnings of 9/11 was eclipsed by an even more
fractious debate over intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Taken
as a whole, finger-pointing is corrosive. Instead of a serious public debate
about national security issues of great consequence, there is a lot of posturing
to advance or undermine reputations that trivializes the issues at stake.
Feith argues the country was unable to have the strategy debate it needed
following 9/11, but even worse, the decision process was so flawed that it was
impossible to have a good strategy debate even within the administration. 316
Hadley, Myers, and others believe this remains the case: “We have not really
had a no-kidding, depoliticized conversation about what it takes to keep this
country safe, consistent with our laws and consistent with who we are as the
American people.” 317
If social mores have changed to allow unabashed criticism of colleagues in
memoirs, so too has the willingness to leak information—classified or not—to
the press, a trend that some note is an international habit as well. 318 Leaders
who lament leaks often try to counteract their effect by leaking countervailing
information themselves. Some journalists and academics justify leaks as
a contribution to transparency, but this argument is suspect. The accuracy of
the leaked information has to be questioned, but it also is clear that leaks can
drive senior leaders into smaller decisionmaking groups with no note-takers
or notes taken, thus diminishing longer term historical transparency. 319 In
any case, it is hard to find a single senior leader account that does not lament
leaks for the damage they do to the decisionmaking process. Leaks embittered
senior leaders toward one another, hurt careers, endangered operations and
operators, encouraged some senior officials to resign, undermined the U.S.
reputation overseas, and hurt national security. 320 Tenet calls leaks the “IEDs of
inside the Beltway warfare.” 321 Leaks help fuel the supercharged, ad hominem
political environment that trivializes matters of supreme importance. That,
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