05 June 2003

Simple As...

I was not surprised to emerge from the interior of my shoe-box apartment and see from the balcony that it is raining again here in the nation's capital. It feels like London here, moist and chill and dark. It is another aseasonal aberration. It should be warm and coming up sunny. It is not, though perhaps it might later. That would make things comply with the rhythm of the season, simple as A, B,C... Like the world should be, and as the nation expects. We have demonstrated shock and awe around the world and things should be coming together. But they are not. The President is coming back from the Middle East with some motion on the Roadmap to Peace and that confident grin. He finished the quick lap around the circuit with a triumphant session at the air base at Doha, Qatar, and said all the right words to the troops. The victory in Iraq was a success wrought from the toil and sweat and blood of dedicated soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Simple and honorable. Straightforward. Simple as A, B, C.

Meanwhile, a woman belt-bomber attacked Russian forces in Chechnya and killed fifteen and the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating and one American was killed and five injured in Iraq. Al Faluja was the place and a grenade was the weapon.

The buzz in the media is that we are in a quagmire, the Russians and us, and that we had not thought through the long-term implications of our respective occupations. The Policy Chief at the Pentagon is under fire for establishing his own intelligence organization at the start of the adventure. In my experience working with Mr. Feith's minions, he is an honorable fellow and I think he just wanted to understand the mountain of detail he was handed by the three letter agencies hedging their bets, making the best assessment, giving it the old intelligence 50-50 odds that so infuriate someone who wants to make it simple, make it understandable and then just make a damned decision on it. But now he is being pilloried because they have not found the nasty weapons. Not yet, any way, and the mute 300,000 murdered Iraqis are irrelevant to the process. It is not simple, though I think maybe it is simpler than the pundits and revanchists seem to think.

I sigh and turn to the list of things on the agenda today. We have to conduct budget reviews at the office, maybe the grimmest of things to conduct. I have sat mostly on the other side of the table, defending the compromise of a three-point-something billion dollar program, all the moving parts, bells and whistles and people and new equipment. Today we will be on the attack, examining the submissions of our components for compliance with the President and Secretary's vision. The components will loath being there, and loath us in turn for exercising power over them. It will not be pleasant and I will not put out coffee and juice to make it seem any nicer than it is going to be. When I was being examined I wanted the inquisitioners in good humor. Today, I want them to understand what the process is about. Make it simple for them to grasp.

The big picture her is easy to sketch in, just ask George W or Don Rumsfeld. But this is not a simple town, in the detail. I think that may be where the political types go astray. The process is about the exercise of power to formulate policy and then direct the distribution of resources. Then the bureaucracy must be forced to execute the decisions. That is normally where the political folks lose interest and the careerists take over.

It is like parking. I went to the Pentagon late yesterday for a promotion ceremony. A good friend was putting on Captain after a long career in the reserves. He is a historian in real life, and selected the 61st anniversary of the battle of Midway for the occasion. He has been working for and around the Navy since 1966. He has quite literally given the institution a lifetime of commitment. His wife and daughter were there, and there was a buffet spread afterward. The fact that he was putting on the rank of Captain and I was taking it off at just about the same time gave the event a poignancy that was very real. The conference room was packed with luminaries, both the hungry lean ones coming up in uniform and the older guys like me in dignified suits. The promotion was effected by the Vice Chief himself, and the Secretary of the Navy stopped by to convey his best regards. It was a very special moment.

But getting into the building was a bit of a trick, and almost a show-stopper for some in the crowd. I had successfully crossed the 14th Street Bridge from the District. I had left the office early, just after five and was astonished to discover that I was ahead of the gridlock. I got off the expressway at the South Parking exit. I won't tell you how emotional parking is here. It is so precious that President Carter tried to charge us for the privilege back in the 1970s to force us to car pool, as if a work force that is scattered from West Virginia and Pennsylvania to the East Shore of Maryland could organize themselves into neat packages of four. No matter. When I worked at the Pentagon I had a "U" pass, which meant that I theoretically worked an unusual schedule and had a need to be fairly close to the building. It was as good as you could get as a single driver.

The hierarchy went: Executive Parking, which got you past the guards and actually up to the Mall or River entrances. Handicapped, which got you to the aisles next to the entrances, then four, three and two member car pool passes in declining order. There was a handful of special letters, "G" for government vehicle, "O" for official-but-private and a couple triple-letter codes that I never did decipher- "GRM" was one of them and seemed to sum up the way you felt when everything else was taken when you arrived. Then in precedence came "U" and finally the dreaded "G" for "general parking," which mean somewhere in the next Zip Code where the wild whipping winter wind off the river would carve your bones, or a spring thundershower would soak you to the skin between the building and the car. And no pass at all? Forget about it. They called those unfortunates without passes the Fern Street Commandos because they had to park at the first row of long-term meters about a mile away in Crystal City.

Oh, there was some shenanigans around those coveted passes. I won't bore you with it. I knew a Captain who got in trouble for stealing one out of an open car window. I saw four-member passes on the dashboards of two-seat Mazda Miatas. Oh, the lies. Oh, the naked exercise of power to get a little closer to the building. I was a two-member car pool one time, having signed up with the officer who I relieved. It was simple.

Yesterday I was pass-less, but it was late in the day and the signs normally indicated a row or two where you could park with impunity after normal working hours. I cruised down the aisles, looking for the correct lane. I was astonished to find all the sings had changed. Gone was the familiar alphabet. Now there were stark white signs that simply read: A, B, C, H.

I marveled at it. Someone had simplified things and thrown all the planning and protocol into a cocked hat. I swallowed hard and just parked the car, hoping they would not tow it away to the impound lot on the other side of the Building. If that happened it would be a hundred to get it back and an hour walking around to figure it out. I talked to someone at the Ceremony about it. The parking Nazis had decided to make it simple. They abolished the old letters and replaced it with the four letters. "A" was for Execs, and there was plenty of parking for them. At least five times what they had before. "B" was for all car pools, regardless of the number of members. And "C" was for all others except the Handicapped, and it was first come, first serve for everyone else. Maybe a blow for democracy. But a definite blow to anyone who wants to park on the Pentagon side of the expressway and not freeze to death on the walk to work. Which will make the "C" holders come in earlier and earlier to fight for the available spaces, since the ones in power are well taken care of. It will make the commuters crazier and crazier and wreak havoc on relationships. But there is plenty of free parking for the executives down front, almost as good as the Handicapped.

I found my car after the ceremony. It had not been towed and it was still in front of a sign that read "B." It meant I was a car pool of indeterminate size. If suitably credentialed, I should have been a general parker with unusual hours. And my Pentagon badge had expired. But that is a matter for another day. As I drove away I realized that in this town the simpler you try to make things the more complicated they get.

Especially parking. Simple as....