When, thanks to an enterprising reporter and a dogged and knowledgeable source, the public learned that the military's Walter Reed Hospital subjected wounded veterans to vermin-infested rooms and levels of care that would be considered unacceptable during the Crimean War, the official reaction was swift: hospital commander Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman and Army Secretary Francis Harvey were summarily fired, as they should have been. They were responsible for overseeing conditions at the hospital, and the inexcusable had occurred on their watch. It is the ethical and professional duty of leadership to insist on accountability, so that everyone knows that incompetence, negligence, and all the -feasances, non-, mis-, and mal-, will not be tolerated.

Unfortunately for the Bush Administration, doing the right thing can be embarrassing when it contrasts so starkly with established patterns of conduct, and the typical practice of the President and his highest-ranking officials has been to avoid holding anyone accountable for even the most egregious mistakes and disasters. Indeed, as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has pointed out, the Bush approach until now has been the opposite. George Tenet, the CIA director who declared to all that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, not only wasn't fired for his agency's disastrous errors, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom. So were General Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer, both key figures in the mishandling of the Iraq occupation. Even worse was the non-response to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which was the epitome of a failure of leadership and the chain of command. A high-ranking head had to roll to demonstrate to the world that the Administration unequivocally accepted responsibility for what had occurred, rejected the proposition put forth by some of its defenders that the abuse should be measured against atrocities committed by Al Qaeda terrorists, and regarded mistreatment of Iraqis as seriously as it did mistreatment of Americans. But the only punishment was meted out to General Janet Karpinsky, who was directly in command of the prison and its hillbilly personnel, and the motley group of under-trained military prison guards whose sadistic handiwork gave propagandists and anti-Americans abroad all the ammunition they would ever need to question our motives, values, and principles.

To his credit, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld grasped the importance of official accountability and offered his resignation, which should have been accepted but was not. The refusal to let Rumsfeld fall on his sword delivered the unmistakable message that no failure, no matter how damaging to the country, justified high level accountability. When FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security continued to botch the response to Hurricane Katrina, only the vain and foolish FEMA chief, Michael Brown, lost his job. Since he had announced he was leaving before the debacle and never should have been appointed in the first place, this was meaningless. Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff needed to join him in official ignominy as a declaration of accountability. In the wake of Scooter Libby's conviction for repeated lies in the CIA leak investigation, it should be obvious to all that this long-running mess merits a house cleaning. The President once said that anyone involved with the leak would be dismissed, then refined the terms of his pledge to anyone found breaking the law regarding the leak, a Clintonian adjustment if there ever was one. He was right the first time: Karl Rove---Out. Vice-President Cheney's staff---'Bye! The way a leader sets ethical standards of competence, diligence, honesty, integrity and responsibility is to insist on accountability when these qualities are not in evidence, either by an official or those who he or she supervises. It wasn't done in the Plame Affair, and obviously won't be.

Now, suddenly, when there is a scandal that cannot be spun or rationalized, with victims, wounded veterans, who the public and the media care about regardless of political bias and belief, the Administration suddenly responds correctly and by the book. This would send the correct message, for once, if it didn't look so much like an aberration. What it really means, I fear, is that the Administration understands the principle of accountability perfectly well. It just lacks the courage and the integrity to live by it.