Robert's Stochastic thoughts

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Bureacratic SNAFU Causes Interruption of US Torture Efforts

If you want to get anything done avoid committees, meetings, and memos.
As a result of such inefficient idiocies, the USA has been stuck in the community of semi decent nations (AKA the civilized world) for months.

“The administration has been engaged in a deliberative and thoughtful interagency process,” Mr. Johndroe said. “This process required additional time as new officials, including the defense secretary, director of national intelligence and White House counsel were brought into the deliberations.”

Not as stirring as "we hold these truths to be self-evident" but it might just do for the next 22 months.

Warning Goodwin's law violation below. Skip next paragraph if your doctor has advised you to avoid Goodwin's law violation.

Reminds me of a story Gosta Esping Anderson once told about how the Bureaucrats in the German Social Welfare agency slow walked the Nazi's effort to politicize the German welfare state (claiming they didn't have the information technology resourses or something) until VE day.

End of Goodwin's law violation related bloggin activities.

Is this another glorious victory for bureaucracy in the service of humanity ?

No bright lines, ignore red flags, count on red tape.

It's the only thing which is holding us above the abyss.

update: should have written
we are dangling over the abyss clinging to red tape

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: You are writing passionately and well.

anne; 5:27 PM
Anonymous said...: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/26/americans_face_a_moral_reckoning?mode=PF

March 26, 2007

Americans Face a Moral Reckoning
By James Carroll - Boston Globe

YOU HAVE been reading "The Sorrow of War" by Bao Ninh, the classic account of what in Vietnam is called the American war. The title of Bao Ninh's novel captures the feeling of grief and loss that always comes in the wake of violent conflict. Allowing room for fear, grief, and loss must define the dominant experience in Iraq today, where the suffering caused by this American war mounts inexorably.

But sorrow has also emerged as a note of life in the Unites States lately. Many comparisons are drawn between this nation's misadventures in Iraq and Vietnam, but what you are most aware of is the return of a clenched feeling in your chest, a knot of distressed sadness that is tied to your country's reiteration of the tragic error. After the chaotic end of the Vietnam War in 1975, you were like many Americans in thinking with relief that the nation would never know -- or cause -- such sorrow again.

The sorrow is back. Everywhere you go, friends greet one another with a choked acknowledgment of a nearly unspeakable frustration at what unfolds in Iraq. This seems true whether people oppose the war absolutely, or only on pragmatic terms; whether they want US troops out at once, or over time. Even about those distinctions, little remains to be said. Bush's contemptuous carelessness, his inner circle's corrupt enabling, the Pentagon's dependable launching of folly after folly, the Democrats' ineffectual kibitzing, even your heartfelt concern for the troops -- these subjects have exhausted themselves. The "surge" of the January escalation was preceded by the surge of public anguish that resulted in Republican losses in November. That election was a stirring rejection of the administration's purposes in Iraq, a rejection promptly seconded by the Iraq Study Group. But so what? Bush's purposes hold steady, and their poison tide now laps at Iran.

Why should you not be demoralized and depressed? But the sorrow of war goes deeper than the mistaken policies of a stubborn president. Next to Bao Ninh's book on your shelf stands "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson. That title suggests how far into the bone of your nation the pins of this problem are sunk. In effect, the disastrous American war in Iraq is the text, while America's militarized way of being in the world is the context. Armed power at the service of US economic sway has made a putative enemy of a vast population around the globe, and that enemy's vanguard are the terrorists. Violent opposition to the American agenda increases with each surge from Washington, whatever its character. Both text and context reveal that every dream of empire brings sorrow, obviously so to the victims of imperial violence, but also to the imperial dreamers, whether or not they consciously associate with what is being done in their name.

But the word sorrow implies more than grief and loss....

anne; 10:22 PM