So let’s play a little mental exercise. (I almost wrote “mind game”, but that has a fairly negative connotation. Having played mind games with at least a couple ex-girlfriends, and losing, I can understand why.)

Let’s pretend you’re the head of a governmental agency. Your agency has an important task, an important mission to perform on behalf of the nation. Your agency has been doing this task for some time now and you and your fellow bigwigs at the agency are concerned about whether or not your agency can continue to perform its mission properly.

You know that people in your organization are not always going to be 100% forthcoming to their bosses, so if you were thinking that you can simply ask everyone “hey, how are we doing? Are we ready, can we perform properly?” you would be wrong. Too many people are going to tell you what they think you want to hear.

Now, you might say to yourself “well, I’m not going to be one of those crappy bosses who only pays attention to what he wants to hear; I’m certainly not going to ignore reality, I’m too smart for that.” Certainly YOU aren’t going to be the guy who (like the boss in the Dilbert cartoons) completely ignores reality and just thinks he’s always right and punishes anyone who dares suggest he’s not, right?

But you still recognize that maybe not everyone in your agency will believe it, so you hire an outside subject matter expert to come in, review everything that’s going on, get a good look at your agency, and then give you a report.

So the guy does it, and comes up with his report. What do you do?

Well, the reasonable, smart answer is that you read the report, think about what it says, think about what that *means*, and then you take some actions based on the report to improve your weak points and build upon your strong points.

Unless, of course, you’re Donald Rumsfeld.

See, the Pentagon had exactly this kind of report done. The conclusion? The author, Andrew Krepinevich (who is a retired Army officer) said that the Pentagon has some big troubles. Basically, he said that we cannot keep the same pace going in Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency there.

He also said at one point:

(U.S. ground forces are under )”enormous strain,” adding, “This strain, if not soon relieved, will have highly corrosive and potentially long-term effects on the force.”

Rumsfeld’s reaction? Oh, no worries. The report is wrong. The force is “battle hardened” and ready to go. (Spoken like someone who hasn’t ever been in battle, of course- hey, the more war those guys fight, the better they’ll be at it. Under that ideology, we shouldn’t give ‘em a break at all- it’s like breaking training for a marathon! We should just keep them there and “battle harden” them more and more!)

Rumsfeld, while criticizing the report and saying how wrong it was, even said he hadn’t read it yet. At one point, Rumsfeld said:

“I just can’t imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they’re close to breaking. That’s just not the case.”

This, in a nutshell, perfectly illustrates why Rumsfeld is a complete fucking idiot. He’s too smart. (That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but stick with me.)

See, there’s no doubt that Rumsfeld is a pretty intelligent guy. You don’t get to where he’s been without being pretty damn smart. The problem is that he KNOWS he’s smart, and he has come to believe that he’s not only smart, he’s infallible. And that’s a pretty bad combination.

I believe Rumsfeld at his word. I believe that he truly can’t imagine that the US armed forces might be in some trouble. This lack of imagination is a horrible, horrible thing to have; someone in his role should have a LOT of imagination. His imagination should keep him up at night, thinking of ways to make the armed forces as tough and ready as possible.

Instead, he rejects a report that his own agency (the Pentagon) sponsored because he can’t imagine the report’s conclusions could possibly be true.

That, folks, is big trouble.

What’s more, this lack of imagination runs rampant through the Bush Adminstration. There’s lots of people who simply can’t imagine that there might be even the tiniest possibility that they’re wrong, or that their preconceived notions of How Things Really Are might be wrong.

Anyway, this kind of blinding arrogance and incompetance is both scary and sad. It’s scary, because these folks are in charge of some pretty important stuff; it’s sad, because despite the fact that it’s been pointed out, they insist that they’re not doing the very thing they’re doing.

PS Yes, I cheated and backdated this. I wrote it on 2 Feb but didn’t finish it off, and forgot to post it when I got off work that night. Worked ten hours, blech. So I posted and then backdated. Sue me. It’s a freakin blog is all.