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Stars and strife

Steven Knipp

US President George W. Bush's address to the nation on Monday kicked off a concerted campaign to regain some status in a war marred by bungled decisions and embarrassing revelations of torture and abuse due to an incompetent military command structure. But why should we be shocked by apparent failings in Iraq?

When New York and Washington were attacked by terrorists three years ago, millions of Americans were appalled and enraged. But many were not entirely surprised by what soon came to be called the greatest intelligence failure in US history. After all, how could Americans really expect their intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA), to be any more competent than the rest of American society in general?

It seems today that virtually everywhere Americans look, from the highest levels of the White House, to the US Space Programme, the National Zoo, the public school system, and yes, even The New York Times, they see a growing culture of gross incompetence.

Just how widespread is this ethos of ineptitude? It is bad. Very bad. By tradition, Americans have always been proud to protect the weak and the powerless. But somehow this honourable practice has been disastrously distorted to the point where American culture now routinely defends the hapless and the clueless. In America no one, it seems, is really accountable for anything anymore.

Thirty years ago, the world was awed by the exploits of America's space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). But over the past 20 years, Nasa's level of competence has fallen to levels that border on negligence. In 1986, after years of rumours and muted reports that quality control and safety standards had become sloppy, the shuttle Challenger exploded on take-off, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

The explosion was due to an erosion of its now infamous 'o-rings'. The actual basis of the disaster was Nasa's decision to launch in weather far too cold to allow the rings to remain flexible; a scenario which engineers had repeatedly warned management to avoid. After that tragedy, it was widely hoped that Nasa would never again be so negligent. Yet last year, Nasa's management again disregarded engineers' warnings, this time about the dangers of foam insulation falling off the wings of the ageing shuttle Columbia.

Seven more astronauts died as a result. Nasa administrator Sean O'Keefe, a Bush appointee hired for his savvy knowledge of public finance, received a scathing report on shuttle safety, which cited 'ineffective leadership'. Then there was the matter of billions in cost overruns. Scores of newspapers demanded his resignation. But Mr Bush insisted that Mr O'Keefe keep his job.

Nearer to the ground is the scandalous ineptitude at America's prestigious 115-year-old National Zoo in Washington DC. In recent years, scores of animals have been mysteriously dying, including a lion, a bobcat, a giraffe, an orangutan, a zebra, an elephant, a kangaroo and rare birds. The final straw came when two rare red pandas died after rat poison was accidentally placed in their cages.

The Smithsonian Institute, which funds the zoo, authorised the National Academy of Science to spend US$450,000 on a year-long investigation at the zoo. The report was scathing, citing major failings in everything from animal care and pest control to record keeping and staff morale, leading to a 10 per cent death rate for the animals. Within hours of the report's release, zoo director Lucy Spelman announced that 'it is time that I move on'. Yet Ms Spelman will be allowed to stay in her US$180,000-a-year post until January.

Ms Spelman, previously the zoo's chief veterinarian, had been hand-picked for the director's job, by the Smithsonian's top boss, Lawrence Small. She had no managerial experience, yet Mr Small overrode his own search committee, which had suggested three other more experienced people. Ms Spelman's chief advantage seemed to be the fact that she, too, had graduated from Mr Small's alma mater, Brown University in Rhode Island.

Yet incompetence in America is by no means restricted to senior bureaucrats. When I moved to Washington, I decided to open an account at Riggs Bank, celebrated for its century-long association with the capital's many embassies. A young clerk there offered to fill out the forms, as her supervisor watched. Passing the documents over to me, I couldn't help but notice that the clueless clerk had written down my address incorrectly, as she did with my phone, passport and social security numbers.

In a blunder that would have horrified an HSBC clerk, there was neither embarrassment nor apologies. In America, to apologise is to admit fault. And to admit fault is to accept responsibility. And to do that is to risk litigation.

So instead of working more intensely to become more competent, the America tendency has become to simply take no notice of the deeds of nincompoops; the way one might ignore drunks at a wedding.

It is said that journalism's job is to pillory society's absurdities, yet American journalism is itself awash in dimwits and deadbeats. First, there was the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times, in which a 27-year-old reporter was discovered making up scores of front-page stories from the comfort of his Brooklyn apartment.

Neither Blair nor his hapless editor, Howell Raines, who had been repeatedly warned about Blair's shady behaviour, were sacked. Both were allowed to resign.

Then it was the turn of USA Today, the country's largest circulation paper, to discover that its star foreign correspondent, Jack Kelly, had been fabricating stories for decades. Again, neither Kelly nor his editor were fired. Both were allowed to resign.

Meanwhile, American schools continue to churn out another generation of slackers. American high school students have long been renowned for being unable to find France on a map, or knowing in which century the American Revolution took place.

Public schools have become so third-rate that a 1998 national survey found that four out of five top students admitted cheating. In another national study, nine of 10 high school teachers admitted that cheating was a serious problem in their schools. Rarely are students severely punished.

In medical circles, incompetence is so common that the US Institute of Medicine estimates medical blunders kill almost 100,000 people every year, in hospitals alone. This has forced American doctors to pay the highest malpractice insurance rates in the world.

The risk of amputating the wrong limbs in surgery has become so real - due to slipshod record-keeping - that surgeons now routinely write on their patient's limbs 'Cut' and Don't cut!' in red ink.

But it was the investigations that followed the events of September 11, 2001, which verified how widespread ineptitude had become in the US. Thanks to the fiction of Hollywood films, Americans have long perceived the FBI and CIA as being the 'best of the best'. Yet September 11 has proved they are often bunglers at best, a fact that outside organisations such as Britain's MI5 and Israel's Mossad have long known.

Neither intelligence agency has ever felt comfortable sharing its secrets with either the FBI or CIA, due to both agencies' histories of employing disgruntled mediocre employees who move on to become bumbling but still dangerous moles.

For 16 years, FBI man Robert Hanssen sold secrets to the Russians, and CIA career officer Aldrich Ames sold his secrets to the Russians for 10 years, which led to the execution of a dozen American agents working inside the then Soviet Union.

Ames, an alcoholic who had been officially reprimanded for leaving his office safe open, was only caught due to an act of supreme stupidity. While on a trip he lent his supervisor his laptop computer. The supervisor discovered a folder called 'Spy Stuff' that contained details of Ames' financial deals with the Russians.

During the investigations into September 11 - which the Bush administration fiercely opposed until public pressure became too strong to defy - it was also revealed that the NSA, whose orbiting satellites monitor and record thousands of telephone calls from around the world, had so few translators that it often took a year to transcribe thousands of hours of tape. Such a time lag made the information contained in the messages absolutely useless to the agency.

America's misfortune today is that incompetence has become an infection so widespread that it is considered the norm, and so is taken utterly for granted. No one ever gets fired for being incompetent in America.

And when there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate like a plague. As the US continues to wallow in the mire of Iraq, the words 'clueless' and 'incompetence' are being increasingly used with direct reference to the White House.

Mr Bush's refusal to accept responsibility for anything that has happened in Iraq has been inflamed by the fact that he has not fired a single senior member of his administration, no matter how badly they have bungled their responsibilities.

CIA director George Tenet has become a poster boy for bumbling ineptitude. It was Mr Tenet's department which presided over the September 11 intelligence fiasco, and again it was he who told Mr Bush that discovery of Weapons of Mass Destruction was a sure thing ('a slam dunk').

And now Mr Tenet has brazenly told US Congress that even three years after September 11, it will still take him another five years for the CIA to get up to speed to deal with terrorism. Senate critics point out that it took only five years for allied forces to destroy both Nazi Germany's forces and the Japanese Imperial Army during the second world war.

Despite Mr Tenet's characteristic career-long incompetence, Mr Bush insists that he be allowed to soldier on. The question now, of course, is will Mr Bush, his generation's iconic slacker, be allowed to keep his job? His employers, the American people, will decide that in November.

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