Followup: Nation Building on the Cheap
I think Thomas Friedman at the New York Times is reading my blog ;-). His column yesterday makes several of the same points as my last post, but is more scathing (especially since it’s coming from someone who supported the Bush administration’s Iraq policy until recently). I usually find him insufferable, but he was good yesterday - here’s the link: Dancing Alone.
Bill Moyers (who I also usually find insufferable, even though I usually agree with him) gave a good interview on NPR yesterday. He made an interesting point about the politics of budgeting for the war (something I criticized Bush for in my last post). Moyers worked for President Johnson during the Vietnam war, and Johnson was caught in a similar political bind in budgeting for that war. He didn’t want to share with the public or with Congress what the long-run cost of the war might be, as he didn’t want to risk it disrupting his domestic political agenda, and he didn’t want to risk losing support for the war. Moyers pointed out that it’s an inevitable bind we face when the leaders of a democracy embark on a “war of choice” (as opposed to a “war of necessity”) - the leaders are motivated to pursue undemocratic means (such as sharing as little information as possible on costs) in order to minimize the risk of losing already shaky political support. For example, it was reported just this morning that the Senate has expressed furstration with the Pentagon’s new $25 billion Iraq “stop gap” budget request (I believe the actual term for it was “contingent supplemental,” meaning that it’s intended to tide the Pentagon over until the next “real” request for money), as it contains no information on how the money even might be spent. So rather than ascribing the behavior of the Bush administration on this point solely to their well-known tendency towards maximizing secrecy, one can also point to the nature of the political circumstance in which they find themselves.
Lastly, yesterday’s CSM has the best article I’ve seen so far on understanding the “chain of command” concerns as they relate to Abu Ghraib: The chain of command under fire.
