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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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WHAT WENT WRONG IN IRAQ…...?

I don’t normally pay any attention at all to VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE, but THIS ARTICLE makes a lot of sense. It looks like a lost opportunity, and the buck stops where it always does…..

Whatever the N.S.C.‘s deficiencies, say the neocons, the buck has to stop with the president. “In the administration that I served,” says Perle, who was an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, there was a “one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: ‘The president makes the decision.’” Yet Bush “did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him.” That, I suggest, is a terrible indictment. Perle does not demur: “It is.” Accepting that, he adds, is “painful,” because on the occasions he got an insight into Bush’s thinking Perle felt “he understood the basic issues and was pursuing policies that had a reasonable prospect of success.” Somehow, those instincts did not translate into actions.

History will sort this out, and apportion responsibility more fairly than we can at the moment. But one is reminded again that mastery of the minutiae isn’t nearly as important as that intangible quality we call “leadership”.

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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/05 at 12:32 PM

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