I meant to blog about this NY TImes article (link goes to the only place i could find it archived) before Thanksgiving, but it got away from me. Interesting stuff:
The Pentagon’s leadership, recognizing that it was caught off guard by difficulties in pacifying Iraq after the invasion, is poised to approve a sweeping directive that will elevate what it calls “stability operations” to a core military mission comparable to full-scale combat.
The new order could significantly influence how the military is structured, as well as the specialties it emphasizes and the equipment it buys.
This is a big deal, of course. Transforming the military doesn’t happen overnight, as Donald Rumsfeld could tell you. Joe Klein wrote this week that the problem with Rumsfeld — and John Murtha, for that matter — is that they want to buy boats to fight China and not Arabic speakers to police the streets of Ramadi. Kein writes:
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has refused to undertake the violent reordering of priorities—more special forces, more intelligence, zero boats—needed to fight a scruffy, labor-intensive struggle against an enemy that thrives in shadows in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Well, it looks like that reordering of priorities is going to happen, as it should. The great thing about the U.S. military is that it’s so incredibly adaptable in the long term. It might take years, however. As Courtney Vance’s character said in The Hunt for Red October, “a boat this big doesn’t exactly stop on a dime.” But the point is that they have the feedback mechanisms in place to evolve. Which is why the U.S. military totally rocks. Seriously.
Maybe that’s the silver lining we take from Iraq. Win or lose, we’ll know better next time. We’ll have the peacekeeping systems to make it work. Is that enough?
Now Playing: Episode 354
Obama and McCain get ready for the conventions, news from Georgia, Russia and Pakistan, the wages of the War on Drugs, and finally, WA’s Governors race gets ugly.
Links Mentioned: The case for not surging in Afghanistan … that drug “bust.”
I was watching Fox News Sunday and Brit Hume’s explanation of all this may foreshadowing how Republicans/Conservatives will handle these issues. Basically he noted that the folks involved in this stuff are lobbyists for casinos, and if there’s one thing we know, it’s that sanctioned gambling invites these sort of bad actors, so the real problem here is legalized gambling. No one else on “the panel” had an answer for that and in fact Juan Williams added something along the lines of and it screws over poor people. That’s how they’ll weasel their way out of it. Problem is they’re absolutely correct with their moral message here — the government shouldn’t really be in the gambling business — brilliant move on their part.
wha??
i don’t follow. abramoff was working both sides of the coin with Ralph Reed. Abramoff would lobby on behalf of the casinos, Reed would lobby on behalf of the anti-casino moral Christians, and they’d split the take.
So if Hume thinks that Casinos invite bad actors, does he think the same about Christianity??
I mean, I agree that Government shouldn’t be in the religion business, but I can’t believe the GOP would argue that!