Personnel Moves

The deck chairs on the Titanic are getting quite a re-arranging this week. John Negroponte is moving to be Condi Rice's deputy at State, with retired Admiral Mike McConnell stepping into the Director of National Intelligence post. White House Counsel Harriet Miers is taking her love letters and going home, with a more strident foe of Congress expected to replace her. Zalmay Khalilzad is poised to become the highest-ranking Muslim in the government by becoming UN Ambassador, with career civil servant Ryan Crocker becoming US Ambassador to Iraq. And the top generals are being purged from Iraq, as they simply refused to give Bush the advice he wanted given.

Now, there are a lot of competing theories as to why this is all happening. Juan Cole thinks the adults are finally taking charge, Steve Benen thinks it's a lot of business to steal the thunder of the new Democratic Congress, and Dan Froomkin calls it "The Purge of the Unbelievers." I think all of them have a point, especially Froomkin.

Harriet Miers, a longtime companion of the president but never a true believer in Vice President Cheney's views of a nearly unrestrained executive branch, is out as White House counsel -- likely to be replaced by someone in the more ferocious model of Cheney chief of staff David S. Addington.

Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizad, considered by Cheney to be too soft on the Sunnis, is kicked upstairs to the United Nations, to be replaced by Ryan Crocker, who presumably does not share his squeamishness.

John Negroponte, not alarmist enough about the Iranian nuclear threat in his role as Director of National Intelligence, is shifted over to the State Department, the Bush administration's safehouse for the insufficiently neocon. Cheney, who likes to pick his own intelligence, thank you, personally intervenes to get his old friend Mike McConnell to take Negroponte's job.

And George Casey and John Abizaid -- the generals who so loyally served as cheerleaders for the White House's "stay the course" approach during the mid-term election campaigns -- are jettisoned for having shown a little backbone in their opposition to Cheney and Bush's politically-motivated insistence on throwing more troops into the Iraqi conflagration.

In fact, it may be worse than that. Replacing Abizaid at CENTCOM is a Navy admiral and former flight officer, set to oversee a couple ground wars. If you factor in the Naval fleets off the coast of both Somalia and Iran right now, perhaps this makes sense. Maybe this is why Wes Clark is so steamed, expecting some sort of pre-emptive bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities.

Clearly the fact that Abizaid and Casey resisted the expected escalation in Iraq (albeit a small escalation, since we don't have the troops) hastened their departure. But you can't get rid of everyone and make Barney the dog head of the Joint Chiefs, which is what you'd have to do to stop the resistance. As the Washington Post puts it,

On deploying new U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush pledged to make sure that the mission is "clear and specific and can be accomplished."

But deep divisions remain between the White House on one side and the Joint Chiefs and congressional leaders on the other about whether a surge of up to 20,000 troops will turn around the deteriorating situation, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. military is increasingly resigned to the probability that Bush will deploy a relatively small number of additional troops -- between one and five brigades -- in part because he has few other dramatic options available to signal U.S. determination in Iraq, officials said. But the Joint Chiefs have not given up making the case that the potential dangers outweigh the benefits for several reasons, officials said.

There are already signs that a limited U.S. escalation, even when complemented by new political and economic steps, may not satisfy either supporters or critics of a surge. Pentagon officials and military experts say far more troops are needed to make a real difference, but the United States would have to remobilize reserves, extend current tours of duty and accelerate planned deployments just to come up with 20,000 troops, U.S. officials say. And such a surge would strap the military for other potential crises, they add.

This is all about buying time. In fact, all of the personnel changes can be seen in that light. The Administration wants to buy time in Iraq, so they change the generals and the diplomats to make it look like they're changing the policy. The Administration wants to buy time with Congress, so they rid themselves of Harriet Miers to get a fighter in there who will stonewall Congressional committees and ensure that official secrecy is maintained.

The effort to form a new legal team anticipates a spate of congressional demands for information on politically sensitive topics such as whether officials authorized the abuse of U.S. detainees, whether the administration turned a blind eye to profiteering by politically connected contractors in the Iraq war, how the White House responded to Hurricane Katrina, and whether senior officials complied with the law in ordering heightened domestic surveillance.

At the Justice Department, lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel have been meeting with counterparts from other agencies to discuss potential points of conflict with Congress and to map out legal strategies for responding to demands for documents and testimony, according to several officials. The department has also held internal meetings on this topic in recent weeks with representatives from the FBI and from Justice's other major components, one official said.

"They face the question of, to what extent you cooperate or protect presidential prerogatives and withhold documents," said H. Christopher Bartolomucci, a former Bush White House lawyer. "Potentially, it could be a period of conflict with the Hill. . . . It's not necessarily going to be a bloodbath, but it's certainly possible."

The Administration wants to buy time with the impossible post of DNI that they created, where one man or woman is supposed to coordinate every single disparate and ego-driven intelligence agency but is given no purse strings to put any leverage on them, so they move out Negroponte (who hated the job) and moved in the new lackey.

Some intelligence experts believe that Mr. Gates is likely to be less territorial than Mr. Rumsfeld was about the Pentagon’s intelligence functions, and may even be eager to cede some of the Pentagon’s authority to the new intelligence chief. Others said that the job of corralling 16 sometimes dysfunctional intelligence agencies is an often thankless task, and one where it is difficult to have a noticeable impact. Mr. Negroponte is said by associates to have grown particularly weary of clashes with members of Congress.

“I think it’s pretty telling that both Bob Gates and John Negroponte prefer jobs trying to bail us out of Iraq to the job of trying to fix U.S. intelligence,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an expert in intelligence overhaul.

In fact, the entire Administration machinery is dysfunctional in its design, yet unwilling to accept this dysfunction. So they change deck chairs.