Bill Gertz - The Failure Factory: How Unelected Bureaucrats, Liberal Democrats, and Big Government Republicans Are Undermining Americas Security and Leading Us to War

THE
FAILURE
FACTORY

CONTENTS

1 THREE BLIND MICE
THE UNTOLD STORY OF BUREAUCRATIC BETRAYAL ON IRAN

10 POLITICAL SURRENDER
PEACE (AND WAR) THROUGH DIVERSITY, MULTICULTURALISM, AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

FOR DEREK

We are a nation that has a governmentnot the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

RONALD REAGAN, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

INTRODUCTION

THE FAILURE FACTORY

O n June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood on the podium in front of the Brandenburg Gate near the hated Berlin Wall, which divided Communist East from free West. He declared: General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! It was one of the most memorable speeches by a U.S. president, and amazingly, only two years later the Berlin Wall did come down. The sight of Germans knocking down that wall with sledgehammers is one of the most significant of the Cold War.

Yet this memorable line from the Reagan speech was almost never delivered. On three different occasions leading up to the speech, State Department bureaucrats, worried about offending the Communists in Russia, pressed the president and his aides as hard as possible within the councils of government to remove the quote from the speech. Reagan refused. The rest is history.

The U.S. government today is in crisis. The power of bureaucratsunelected government officialshas grown wildly out of control. Although the United States has been governed by an ostensibly conservative administration for the past eight years, it is in fact dominated by left-liberal political activists and government bureaucrats with their own agenda. The officials, entrenched throughout the government, are supposed to follow the policies set by the administration the American people elected, but in fact they actively subvert those policies and programs. These unelected bureaucrats have undermined representative government.

Sadly, among the culprits are not just liberal Democrats but some so-called Republicans as well. They are all part of what the late Jeane Kirkpatrick called the Blame America First crowd. They view the United States, not Americas enemies, as the source of the worlds evils.

The crisis is leading to weakness, a lack of national purpose, and ultimately to warnot merely regional conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that are the outgrowth of the war against Islamist extremism, but even a global conflict against the emerging power of the nuclear-armed Communist dictatorship in China and the many autocratic states and tyrannies that support it. Many strategists compare the current era to the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler was rising and leaders in the West failed to see and respond to the danger. Winston Churchill noted that World War II was the most unnecessary war in history. If only the leaders in the West at the time had had the will, foresight, and courage to take a firm stand, Hitler would have been stopped and the deaths of more than 72 million people could have been averted.

Today, a comparable threat is posed by Communist China, whose leaders have adopted a secret strategy to defeat the United Stateswith arms or without. And as in the 1930s, U.S. and allied leaders for several decades have sent all the wrong signals to a regime that is to blame for the deaths of at least 60 million of its own people.

Other dangers include a resurgent authoritarian Russia, still armed with nuclear weapons and bent on recovering the status of the lost Soviet empire. Then there is the radical clerical regime in Iran, which is intent on building nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them, and is led by an Islamist zealot who has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. The rogue state of North Korea, with its 2006 demonstration of nuclear weapons and an arsenal of long-range missiles, poses a direct threat to the United States, and years of feck less negotiations promoted by government bureaucrats did little to promote disarmament but instead provided the failed totalitarian state with time and ultimately international legitimacy that it did not deserve.

The bureaucrats and careerists, officials at the upper and middle levels of government agencies, have adopted policies and programs set by liberal elites who view the United States, not Americas enemies, as the source of world evil. They are driven by their anti-American liberalism into constraining the United States from taking necessary action, whether its an exercise in hard power (military force) or in soft power (political or ideological influence).

The crisis of government bureaucracy is accelerating. At no other time has the need to reform the subversive nature of the system been more critical than now. The presidential election of 2008 will be a referendum on the excesses of government bureaucracy. On one side is the Democratic vision of Senator Barack Hussein Obama, a charismatic but misguided liberal with little experience who will allow his fellow liberal bureaucrats not only to preserve but actually to enhance their unelected power. On the other side is the moderate Republican senator John McCain, a combat veteran of Vietnam who understands the multiple crises facing the nation. He has shown that he does not fully understand the nature of the problem of government bureaucracy, though at least he knows that government red tape is holding back the country.

But the problems run much deeper. The vast network of bureaucrats and their enablers in the political class have had a devastating effect on American national security. The anti-American forces have:

subverted get-tough policies toward our enemies Iran, North Korea, and Russia (ignoring Moscows creep back to totalitarianism and its growing anti-Americanism)

undercut the U.S. position in the war on terrorism, preventing aggressive military, intelligence, and law-enforcement operations against Islamist extremist groups by undermining the national consensus that emerged after the 9/11 attacks for waging a global war against terrorisminstead shifting back to the ineffective law-enforcementdominated approach of the Clinton administration

overrun the power departments of the U.S. government, including the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House National Security Council

populated the upper ranks of military with holdovers and sympathizers from the Clinton administration, including a generation of Clinton generals who have been schooled in political correctness and who vehemently oppose the administrations conservative policies and programs