A Rand Corporation analyst came to the Pentagon and suggested that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the U.S., the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The article points out that this is not the government’s policy or view, but rather an independent analyst’s perspective; it also suggests that this perspective has growing currency within the Bush administration.
I heard Defense Secretary Rumsfeld fulminating on NPR’s top-of-the-hour news about this Pentagon leak. “Unprofessional,” he fumed. It did not represent the government’s point of view. It was obviously “leaked by someone who wants to feel important.” The leaker, he concluded, should go to jail.
This is the Bush administration’s reflex every time there’s a leak exposing a policy rift: Which traitor broke ranks?
Isn’t it time Rumsfeld and his colleagues grew up and admitted that leaks like this happen only when there is genuine disagreement among policymakers, and one of them, vying for position, chooses to send up a flare in the press? (I’m not subscribing here to the darker conspiracy-theory view that these leaks are in fact orchestrated by the administration even as it disavows them. That can happen, but I don’t think it happens often, and I don’t think it’s happening now.)
Rumsfeld may not like that way of doing business. It is arguably not a good way of doing business. But it’s not about “wanting to feel important.” There’s a real issue at stake here: How do we deal with the fact that Saudi Arabia’s government is both an ally and in many ways a backer of the radical Islamism that we find ourselves fighting?
Since we’re nominally “at war” and American lives are actually and potentially at stake, those policy conflicts ought to be debated in full public view, not left purely to the “professionals.” Instead, the Bush administration’s first resort is to demand that leakers go to jail.
Which former Republican administration does that remind you of? Right — one that ended in resignation and disgrace. Rumsfeld knows all about the Nixon crew’s way of dealing with leaks, of course; he got his start in politics with them.
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