Thoughts on Leadership by Elected Officials

This is going to be a strange lead in to make a political point, but stay with me.

Saturday I worked at a pancake breakfast to raise money for the civic group I belong to. I finished my shift and bought my own breakfast. I was getting a cup of coffee and the guy who was monitoring the coffee asked me if it was hot enough. I replied the coffee was hot enough for me, but maybe not for someone else.

Let me explain. I don’t like really hot food. I’m not conditioned to it. This is a result of years of eating C-rations cold. Plus, when you are the platoon leader, you eat last. If someone is going to go hungry, it’s going to be you. And, since you eat last the food has cooled. There’s a saying in the military; Rank has its Privileges, and Rank has its Responsibilities. One of the responsibilities is taking care of the people who work for you instead of using your rank to abuse the people who work for you. It’s one way of getting the people who work for you to trust you. Good leaders lead by example. They show the people who work for them that they will share their hardships. They do not subscribe to “do as I say and not as I do” leadership.

So, how does that all relate to current politics?

While I was driving today I started thinking about how we got into Iraq. We got into Iraq because of manipulated intelligence. Remember the story of the little boy who cried wolf? And the same people who cried wolf to get us into this mess are still around trying to tell us what needs to be done next. How are we supposed to trust someone who cries wolf? Here is another point.

For intelligence to be useful, that intelligence must be restricted. If everyone knows the secrets we have discovered, then the knowledge of those secrets is useless. Understand this, the members of the Congress have access to the same intelligence the Executive Branch has. Part of the reason we are in Iraq is that the Congress failed to adequately assess the intelligence they had access to.

So, here’s a question for you. If you have been lied to about the content of intelligence in order to justify a course of action you might not otherwise have agreed to, then what do you do about it?

In the short term, the clearest answer is that you should get rid of the people who have shown themselves unworthy of your trust. The 2006 election did a partial job, but not a complete one.

But what should we do about the long term? My answer is that we need to find a way to make sure that those who are elected are worthy of our trust in this matter. Character is an important factor to judge in electing a political official. Unfortunately, as we have seen of late, the simple profession of allegiance to a religious faith is no guarantee of character.

Since professions of character can fail us, then I would suggest is that we as voters demand that our elected representatives set up systems that are both deterrents to bad behavior and are also transparent to us.

Remember the attitude of the Founding Fathers? The ones who signed the Declaration of Independence? Benjamin Franklin said something to the effect of, “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.” We need to get some of that approach back in public life today.

I suggest to you that one of the reasons the smoke and mirrors worked and why hard questions were not asked back in 2002, was that those with the access to the intelligence did not have the personal treasure of the lives of their children and the children of their relatives at direct risk to implement the course of action they approved.

If you want to implement a system to ensure personal accountability for National Defense decisions, then do this. Demand a return to the Lottery Draft system we had in the late ‘60s just before we went to the “volunteer” concept.

It’s as simple (and as difficult) as that. Let’s bring an end to do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do leadership.