Late yesterday afternoon, I was summoned to the Pentagon for a situation meeting following the first day of General Petraeus’ Congressional testimony on Iraq. Thirty seven people filled a large conference room. The seating followed typical Washington protocol – the alpha dogs occupied places in plush leather upholstered oversized chairs at a large oval table, in this case topped with polished rosewood. The beta dogs sat on vinyl clad metal office chairs arranged around the wall; these were the usual collection of low-ranking military officers and GS-13’s, anxiously taking notes or tapping away at their laptops. At the oval table, the top dog, in this case an Army lieutenant general, sat facing the window, which looked out across the Potomac at the Washington Monument. Precedence among the alpha dogs was observed starting with him. On his left and right sat three major generals from the Army, Air Force and Marines, and a rear admiral, upper half, followed by a collection of brigadier generals, navy captains and chicken colonels, arranged by rank in descending order, interspersed with various high-ranking civilian DOD honchos. Then came the various feds invited from other agencies, such as the State Department, DHS, CIA and NSA. At the extreme opposite end of the table, facing a wall decorated with a constellation of military plaques and framed by an array of flags arranged according to their own pecking order, sat the hired guns, the consultants and contractors.
In such seating arrangements, there is, of course, one single seat at the very bottom of the table, looking the Big Kahuna right in the eye through a gauntlet of suits and uniforms. That’s what we Washington insiders call the Hot Seat, and, as the little folded name cards indicated, yesterday evening it was mine.
His Nibs began with a lengthy diatribe, liberally peppered with Pentagon-speak, concerning the “facts on the ground” in Iraq. Then he kissed up to Petraeus for a couple of minutes, slathering on the usual terms employed for that purpose – “integrity,” “professionalism,” “dedication,” and so forth. Then he blasted moveon.org for placing that snarky ad in the New York Times, using it as a springboard to segue into a summation of the meeting purpose. “Petraeus executed a series of drives drawn from a well-organized play book, maintaining control of the ball and pressing the offense right through the last two minutes of the second quarter. Now it’s half time and what we need to determine is this: how do we get the people in the stands – the American public – to stand up and cheer for the home team?”
“He’s got to make the big play,” a fellow from EOP chimed in, “give them a Hail Mary pass that they can’t ignore.”
“I disagree,” objected an Army brigadier general, “he racked up plenty of points with a good ground game today, and I figure ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
“It’s all psychological,” a CIA representative observed, “we have to remember that confidence is contagious – and so is lack of confidence. Whatever we recommend, it can’t end up getting him sacked with an unexpected rush around an open end.”
“I agree,” said the man from DHS, “failure is not an option. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. He’s got to be rested and ready to throw one long spiral after another, right into the receiver’s hands.”
“But let’s not,” cautioned a woman from the NSA, “lose sight of the goal posts trying to run fancy plays that look good on television.”
“Now, that’s just what I would expect from NSA,” thundered the Air Force major general, “and to that I say this – no guts, no glory. If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, why do they keep score?”
“Exactly,” an Undersecretary of Defense concurred, “if he’s not fired with enthusiasm, he’ll be fired with enthusiasm. He’s got to face that defensive line in Congress and keep them from reading his plays.”
“The reaction from Congress doesn’t look very good,” a contractor two seats away from me reported, “we’ve been monitoring it, and it’s obvious his position is fourth and long.”
“It’s not whether you get knocked down,” an Army colonel responded, “it’s whether you get up again. The important thing about today is that he never fumbled.”
“No doubt about that,” said an Air Force brigadier general. “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. He was dodging Congressional linebackers and nose tackles like a champ today.”
“Yeah,” a Deputy Secretary of Defense allowed, “but tomorrow, some Democrat cornerback could step in and be a big spoiler.”
“Hell,” the Marine major general commented, “I’m not nearly so worried about some Democrat cornerback as I am about some Republican safety intercepting one of his passes and running it all the way down the field for six – and then having to watch them bring out Chuck Schumer to kick the extra point.”
“Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” the rear admiral stated authoritatively, “He’s got to keep charging down that field until the clock runs out.”
“Absolutely,” the navy captain sitting next to him agreed, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. What Petraeus needs is more coverage while he’s in the pocket.”
There was a long, pregnant silence. The Big Kahuna stared down that huge, polished table at me, his eyes burning holes in my head. “What do you think, Collins?”
“Sir, I think the reason we’re losing in Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t play football.”
There was another long silence – but not a pregnant one. No, this silence was fully delivered of a very peculiar baby, regarding it askance, fending off hubby’s astounded looks, wondering if perhaps that dalliance with the FedEx driver had proved, in the fullness of time, to be a somewhat ill advised self-destructive impulse. Even at the distance involved across that enormous table, I could see His Nibs turning bright red with an upright and offended military rage.
“Explain that,” he demanded. I drew a deep breath.
“Sir, it is not only this august gathering that uses football jargon as a conceptual framework for analysis. Members of Congress, for example, when commenting on General Petraeus’ remarks today, said things like ‘whenever we open a hole in the line for them and hand off, the Iraqis drop the ball.’ The fundamental flaw in our approach is that we – and by that I mean the military, Congress, indeed, the entire US Government, their contractors and their consultants – think like members of an NFL franchise. But the Iraqis don’t.”
“Well, then,” the Big Kahuna importuned, “what the hell do the Iraqis think like?”
“Sir,” I continued, “The Iraqis think of everything in terms of a major sport, just like us. The Iraqis, however, think of everything in terms of the major sport we call ‘soccer.’”
“Soccer?” His Nibs huffed mightily. “Soccer’s the game divorced suburban career women make their boys play so they’ll turn into tree-hugging sissies.”
General laughter at the lieutenant general’s joke ensued, although I noticed that several women around the room not only refrained from laughing, but also turned a shade or two redder from mortification than he had in vexation. When the last guffaws subsided, he pressed on. “So, Collins, are you suggesting that we teach the Iraqis how to play football?”
“That is one of several possible approaches, sir,” I dryly replied.
“And another one, I suppose,” the gentleman from State interjected, “would be for us to start looking at circumstances from a soccer player’s point of view? I think that’s what Mr. Collins is getting at here.”
“I don’t know about that,” the Army major general said, uncertainly, “it would mean learning a whole new set of rules and, even worse, watching a lot of soccer matches. How much,” he inquired, peering down the table at me, “do you think it would cost to deploy the necessary infrastructure for football in Iraq?”
“I’m pretty sure we could do it for less than a billion dollars,” I replied, pulling the Washington figure for “chump change” out of my posterior, “but there are other considerations…”
“Such as what?”
“Ah, well,” I pointed out, “even though modern footballs are constructed using leather or plastics, it’s still called a ‘pig skin.’ That might severely impact acceptance in a Moslem society.”
“In addition,” the fellow from State observed, “football as we know it is only played here in the United States. Imposing the game on the Iraqis might offer our adversaries a big propaganda coup – Yankee cultural imperialism and all that.”
“Whereas,” I went on, picking up on that thread, “soccer is played all over the world.”
“Are you suggesting,” His Nibs asked, gruffly, “that the Defense Department start thinking like our adversaries do?”
“Sir,” an Air Force colonel stepped in, “I believe that in ‘The Art of War,’ Sun Tzu pointed out that thinking like your enemy is the best way to defeat him.”
“Screw that New Age [expletive]!” a Marine colonel shot back indignantly, “all that gook war philosophy went out the window with the Clinton Administration! I was in the ‘Nam, fly boy, and I’ll tell you what the best way to defeat your enemy is – napalm!”
A Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense turned to look down the table at me. “Just how hard is it to learn the rules of soccer, Mr. Collins?”
“It’s much simpler than NFL football. A complete soccer rule book might run fifty pages. And you know what the NFL rule book looks like.”
He nodded sagely. “The Washington telephone directory.”
“So it’s feasible,” the fellow from State observed, “that we could start using soccer as our epistemological paradigm.”
“Keep those ten-dollar words down at Foggy Bottom where they belong,” the Big Kahuna snapped. “This is the Pentagon. We talk American here.”
“Sorry general,” the fellow from State replied politely, “what I meant was, if the rules are simple enough, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard for us to start thinking like soccer players instead of football fans.”
“Okay,” the guy from DHS said, “suppose we do that. Then we start going to press conferences and answering questions, and the answers all come out sounding like we’re David Beckham. What then, Mr. Collins? How will the average American even understand what we say?”
“The answer,” I responded, “is simple. You think like that, but you don’t speak like that. Instead, you present your answers to the American public in plain, concise language that clearly addresses the issues at hand and contains no sports metaphors of any kind.”
“My God, Collins,” the CIA representative exclaimed, “you can’t be serious.”
“That’s right,” the gentleman from EOP agreed, “if we have to choose between not being able to use sports metaphors and jargon in our communications to the public and losing in Iraq, well… we’re just going to have to drop back and punt.”
“Understood,” I answered, fixing my gaze once more at the end of the table, where the spit polished brass on His Nibs uniform blazed and glittered in the rays of the setting sun, “in which case, sir, I think that Petraeus should go to a shotgun formation and throw the long bomb.”
General Top Dog considered my suggestion for a moment, then spoke, rather cordially, “Okay. Why?”
“Deep view of the defensive backs and the best passing options for wide receivers, sir. Bottom line, it’s the optimum combination of high scoring potential with crowd pleasing action.”
At this, he nodded and smiled. You know you’ve earned your consultant’s fee if you can get a lieutenant general to smile.
The meeting took off then, for another hour or so, with everybody suggesting plays. The smart ones prefaced their ideas with stuff like “So, after he’s thrown the long bomb out of the shotgun…” It was obvious that I’d nailed it, but decorum here inside the Beltway demands that, in such circumstances, everybody get their two cents in for the record. That way, they all have at least one entry in the meeting minutes which shows their bosses some evidence that they’ve been working.
Today, at my office, I slid back the wall panel that hides the HDTV screen and watched Petraeus throw the long bomb out of the shotgun, over and over again. Yeah, some of us do our jobs well and some do not, but we are judged by only one thing – the results.