Leadership's essential concubines

Vijay sent me a link from the WSJ's editorial page where Peggy Noonan talks about the similarity between what's happening in Iraq & what happened when the British granted & divided India and created Pakistan. You can read the entire article here.

What I want to reproduce here is Peggy Noonan's opinion on why the leaders of Britain, India & the to-be state of Pakistan miscalculated so badly when doing what they did:

Excerpts from her column:

"So they were all driven by their mission. And by personal ambition, which tends to narrow one's focus, or rather train one's focus on oneself, and away from more important things.

And there was something else.

"The leaders of the day did not know that terrible violence was coming because of what I think is a classic and structural problem of leadership: It distances. Each of these men was to varying degrees detached from facts on the ground. They were by virtue of their position and accomplishments an elite."

Most insightfully for me, Ms. Noonan goes on to say:

If you are a leader, recognize what drives you. Know your motives. Mountbatten could have resisted partition, or slowed it, or lessened its impact. He was a decisive and dynamic man, a great one I think, but if he'd been capable of introspection, of self-analysis, of self-skepticism, he might have recognized and resisted his too-driven sense of Mission, and the personal vanity that was always, with him, a spur.

Those days spent in Wirdum & Groningen do make sense don't they?