Loyalty
I’ve been thinking about loyalty a lot lately. In particular because of a conversation I was having about Powell leaving office. I was thinking that he was a great person to have on board because he voiced his concerns, but then when the decision was made, ended up backing up the person in charge. I was thinking that that was the ideal of loyalty. You are honest with the person in private, but then in public you are loyal.
It was pointed out to me, that while this may be valuable in most cases, there are some cases when loyalty is screaming from the rooftops that something has gone horribly awry. If you know, to the depths of your soul, that something is wrong, and the person in charge is not listening, it is time to take drastic measures. Not just for you, but for the thing you are being loyal to. In the case of Powell, it would be for the country, so we aren’t led into a horrible mistake, but if he really did feel that loyalty specifically to Bush, then it should be for him. He should have resigned back when he was asked to lend his authority to the decision.
The reason is two fold. First, his authority would then have not been backing it, and the policy might have been changed. That is to say, by taking the drastic measure of resigning, he could have stopped the things he saw going wrong from happening. And second, by lending his support, but then letting leak that he opposed it, he no longer sounds like the loyal man that he wanted to appear. Not only did he let the person (country) he was supposed to be loyal to fall, he makes it sound like it wasn’t his fault. e.g. he did “everything he could” to avoid it.
I heard a very similar argument from Ginmar about the marines protecting that guy in Fallujah, “Loyalty is a concept that will fuck you up every time. Blind loyalty will not just hurt you—it will hurt the thing you love, the people you love, and the principles you hope you hold.” It is an interesting problem. We want to back those we love, but blindly backing every play they make is not loyalty. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it was disgraceful on the part of Powell, because in his case, he has the option to resign in protest to a decision, whereas the troops in the field don’t have that same option. See, the twelve guys who opted not to go on the lightly armored fuel convoy. This is an interesting problem at both the national and personal level.