It can happen to any organization. The original intent — or, at any rate, declared purpose — of the concern gets lost amidst the chaos of hard-to-manage projects and personnel, as individuals re-define their goals at variance with the official end; as corruption sets in; as functions decay into forms persisting out of mere inertia; as institutional memory and learning get short-circuited by broken feedback loops and a culture of silence, secrecy, and hush-hush prudence.
No organization is exempt, but it happens most often, and easiest, in government.
Take the experience of Peter Van Buren, late of two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams, related in The American Conservative:
In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back.…
What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis.…
Van Buren wrote a book on that huge divide between secret truth and public lie, and, of course, got in trouble for it. Folks higher up in government are not renowned for their love of whistle-blowers. Van Buren not unexpectedly finds himself being shown the door on his own career, or, as he puts it, his superiors are preparing to put his “head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees.”
Government may not honor whistle-blowers, but citizens should. After all, it is allegedly for our sake that government does what it does. To discover, as Mr. Van Buren discovered, that “we failed in the [Iraq] reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war,” is news we must incorporate into our storehouse of foreign policy wisdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “What a Whistle-blower Learned”
Economics and deplomacy both teach us there are commonly great differences between intended and actual results.
There is also no surprise that the reported results by the government are better than actual performance. This works everywhere, including foggy bottom, the CBO, public companies annual reports and any child reporting about his day at school to his parents at dinner.
Truthful persons are commonly labeled prophets, and even when history proves their predictions correct they are still dismissed. Your favored Dr Paul comes to mind.
Truthful people are labeled as prophets, and then crucified.