He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
I am shocked.. shocked, I tell you.
And this:
“I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing” Petraeus, and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, “of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
This Kickstarter thing is close to something I've been thinking about for quite some time. Minus the aspects that make it worthy of being a parody, there's something to be said for the idea of an entrepreneurial approach to these problems. It's the ossification/inertial problem again: Schumpeter as applied to warfare and intelligence.
Cass, that book -- if the initial press reports about it are right -- ought to be a kind of shock therapy. I don't know that it will be, because I suspect the American people are cynical enough to have known this all along about their government.
Still, every remaining decent American ought to be furious about what has passed here. There ought to be a severe reckoning with a political class that has so badly used America's bravest and best.
2 comments:
I didn't think anything about this debacle could make me laugh.
Thanks for posting this. By the way, have you seen this article about Gates' new book?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html
He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
I am shocked.. shocked, I tell you.
And this:
“I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing” Petraeus, and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, “of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
This Kickstarter thing is close to something I've been thinking about for quite some time. Minus the aspects that make it worthy of being a parody, there's something to be said for the idea of an entrepreneurial approach to these problems. It's the ossification/inertial problem again: Schumpeter as applied to warfare and intelligence.
Cass, that book -- if the initial press reports about it are right -- ought to be a kind of shock therapy. I don't know that it will be, because I suspect the American people are cynical enough to have known this all along about their government.
Still, every remaining decent American ought to be furious about what has passed here. There ought to be a severe reckoning with a political class that has so badly used America's bravest and best.
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