Now it appears that Bush is "fighting back" against the people who say the Bush administration lied about the reason the U.S. went to war against Iraq.
President Bush on Friday shot back at critics claiming his administration misconstrued or lied about pre-war intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."
Frankly, I think it is the Bush administration that is deeply irresponsible.
The Bush administration said the reason for the action against Iraq was because of WMDs. They then said it was because of violations of U.N. sanctions. They then said it was because of Saadam's treatment of Iraq citizens. Then it was said the seed of Democracy in the country would be good for the Middle East.
At one point, the president was saying that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11/2001 attacks, but the vice-president was saying that Iraq was involved.
Did the Bush administration communicate a clear and consistent story for the action against Iraq?
No.
In fact, the most consistent and supportive reasons for action against Iraq came not from the Bush administration, but from commentators and pundits who backed the administration.
Men and women of our country were sent to fight in a foreign country, yet the President of the United States, seemingly, can't give a straight answer on why we are there.
In short, the Bush administration can't communicate worth jack!
So, when the opposition takes advantage of this lack of communication, the supporters of the president say the opposition is working against the interests of the U.S.
I have a question about working against the interests of the U.S.
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition called the sitting president "white trash"?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition said the president was guilty of having fathered the son of a Black prostitute?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition said the president was the cause of low morale in the service?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition pushed story after story of enlisted military people who wanted to leave the service?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition started writing articles of impeachment after the president was re-elected, but before any revelations of sexual misconduct and perjury?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition stated a military action was done to cover up a situation concerning sexual misconduct?
Was it working against the interest of the U.S. when the opposition stated agencies tasked with defending the U.S. are not supported by the administration in power?
In the end, it comes down to partisanship and power. People want their party to be in power so they will have some power to do what they want to do; health and security of the U.S. be damned.
The men and women in the military deserve better. The people of the U.S. deserve better.
Lawrence Wilkerson lays out the structural and managerial failings of the neocon cabal.
I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."
But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.
STEVEN CLEMONS: Thank you very much for joining us today, and thank you for your patience about seats. I know when the room is crowded and full what a hassle it is to – you know, as the room heats up.
But I do promise a very active and fun, interesting question-and-answer period following Larry Wilkerson’s presentation. For those of you who have not been here before, welcome to the New America Foundation. I’m Steve Clemons. I run our foreign policy programs here, and our foreign policy activities are expanding rapidly.
I hope all of you are on our list. If not, let me know and I’ll be happy to add you to our roster of programs that deal with things international and national security policy.
This is part of a series of forums that we’ve begun this year that eventually will lead into a major project that we’re calling our Solarium exercise. It’s very interesting. When President Eisenhower and his team came in after President Truman, there was a lot of scrutiny and thought that went into questions about whether to continue the doctrine of containment, whether to take a different track. And it was fascinating that Eisenhower at that time orchestrated three competitive teams with economics analysts, generals, national intelligence experts, and essentially they had to think about the world view that they were trying to sell in terms of policy, and they had to pay for it; they needed to think systematically about the social and economic costs and consequences of these various policies. And it was a very interesting way to discipline thinking about the direction that made the most sense for the United States.
And so what we’ve tried to do is use that as sort of a metaphor for how we need to think about our own debates and thinking, and it’s been a real pleasure for us to encounter folks that are both policy practitioners, but also people that bring, I think, real vision to the kind of world that we need to think that we are evolving towards in 20 or 30 years out, and who also think a lot about process.
And today we have Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – Larry Wilkerson – who many of you know served from the years 2002 through to this year as Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department. He is also the former associate director of policy planning at the Department of State, the former director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College, and he’s getting ready to teach some courses on national security at the College of William & Mary and at George Washington University.
He is also one of the speakers that spoke in our major September forum. Ted – oh, you’ve got a seat right there? Ted Alden, Financial Times – a very good guy. (Laughter.) Make sure he’s comfortable, get him a Coke.
In any case, it is a great pleasure and privilege to introduce to you today Larry Wilkerson, who will share his thoughts on America’s national security decision-making process, and I think will give some interesting historical context to what has changed and what’s the same, and whether this is a boon or a danger to American democracy.
So without further ado, please welcome Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
(Applause.)
COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: I couldn’t help but grow somewhat nostalgic as Steve was talking about Dwight Eisenhower – (laughter). Though I was 7 to 15, roughly, during his tenure as president, I sometimes find myself longing for it – (laughter) – especially President Eisenhower’s rather conformistic – if that’s not too big a word – approach to the 1947 National Security Act. In other words, he thought it was a piece of legislation that was passed by the Congress of the United States, the people’s representative, and he damn well ought to follow it, and did so probably to an extent that few presidents, if any, have since.
I want to thank Steve and the New America Foundation for giving me this opportunity, and thank some of my friends for turning out. I see an assistant secretary over here – I think he’s left that post now – who used to spend some time in my office, and I see others around the room. I see some journalists in here who have been trying religiously to get me over the last three or four months. You finally got me, at least on this topic.
I was out in Montana recently fly fishing in Yellowstone National Park, standing in a river, and I had mistakenly brought my cell phone. And it went off and I answered it, and I won’t tell you who it was, but it was someone from the New York Times wanting to interview me about the detainee abuse issue. And I feel so strongly about that issue I released the trout I was then catching – (laughter) – got out of the Madison River, got up on the bank, told me son-in-law to keep fishing, and talked to the gentleman for about a half an hour. And if any of you have any questions on that issue, of course I’d be glad to address them.
I have two approaches to what Steve was alluding to as my topic today. The one is the approach of an academic. For some six years at the Naval War College at Newport and then at the Marine Corps War College at Quantico, I taught some of the brightest people in America, 35- to 40-year-old military officers of all services, both genders, and all professional skills within the services. You want to teach someone who will challenge you on an hourly basis, try that.
One of the things that I taught them was a very esoteric subject to most of them who were battalion commanders, fighter squadron commanders, destroyer or cruiser captains, or some other really tactical-level position in their service theretofore – 15 years in some cases; in other cases, maybe as much as 18 or 20. They came to me as tactical experts, as the very best. In most services they were picked out of the top 15 to 20 percent. In all services I would say they were picked out of the top 50 percent. So I’m looking at a very bright seminar of 15 to 16 people who know a whole hell of a lot more than I do about their services, particularly if they’re not in the Army, and who know a great deal about tactical applications of power, if you will.
But they know very little about such esoteric subjects as the national security decision-making process. So you go through a lot trying to get them up to speed so that they can then deal with what you’re going to throw at them at a really rapid pace after they’re up to speed. Some of them can’t take it. Some of them tell you, “I’d like to go back to my battalion,” “I’d like to go back to my ship,” “I don’t like this world of strategy, international relations, politics, interagency activities, and so forth.” And they’re very honest with you.
Others take to it -- like I think probably Colin Powell did at the National War College in the mid- to late-‘70s -- and become bigger because of the experience, and then go on hopefully to gain stars and be fairly influential in their own professions.
As I dealt with the national security decision-making process, therefore I developed a bifurcated view about it. The one side was academic, the one side read the 1947 National Security Act that Harry Truman signed on 26 July 1947 and the amendments thereto, and understood that the Goldwater-Nichols Act – the DOD reorganization act, 1985 I believe it was – actually brought the 1947 act into a new realm, actually closed some gaps that had been in the original act, and created the finest military staff in the world from a staff that theretofore had been a desultory, at best, and even mediocre staff, and put at its head the man who had been the titular boss of the armed forced before – and titular is probably too strong a word – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and made him the principal advisor to the secretary of Defense, the president of the United States, and the National Security Council. So this was a monumental change.
And I will tell you -- because I was there in the midst of the fight; I was in the arena, so to speak – it was tough. It was very, very tough to force the armed forces into jointness, which is the jargon that we use to describe it.
Today, we desperately need a Goldwater-Nichols Act for the entire federal government – desperately. We need to force the interagency process, for example, to conform to President Clinton’s PDD-56, if you’re familiar with that. It was a document that described – it could be improved on, but it described very well how America should deal with crisis. The problem was nobody followed it. The problem was nobody followed it so bad that when a Senate group was set up to investigate that very subject, and called my boss, who was then a private citizen for whom I was working in a private capacity, and said, “Would you come sit on our group? Would you help us with this – because we really think the process is broken,” my boss’ answer was simply, “No, I won’t, because you’ve got it already. You can’t hardly improve on what you’ve got already; you just have to force execution of what you’ve got.”
Now there are many critics who will say you cannot, in our system of government, force the executive branch to do something that it doesn’t want to do. The framers of the 1947 act I don’t think would agree with that.
Now before I turn to the formal part of my presentation, which is a little bit of history, let me just say that the other side – the reason my views are bifurcated – the other side is my practical experience; practical experience sitting at the right hand of a very powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, underneath a very powerful secretary of Defense by the name of Richard Cheney, and watching probably one of the finest presidents we’ve ever had – that’s how I feel about George H.W. Bush – exercise one of the greatest adeptnesses at foreign policy I’ve ever seen. So many things happened in George H.W. Bush’s four years, that I think when historians write about it with dispassion – 25, 30 years from now – they’re going to give that man enormous credit for knowing how to make the process work. It took them awhile; took them about nine to 10 months to get their act together, but once they did, they worked very well.
So I’ve seen that aspect of it. I saw the Clinton administration, up close and personal. It took them a little longer than that to get their act together, and in a very intimate way, I saw the George W. Bush administration, from 2001 to early 2005 – a little over four years.
So I have two approaches, if you will: the academic over here and the practitioner over here, and sometimes I get them confused. The ground is so rich for an academic and for a person who has taught the National Security Act and what has come out of the National Security Act that I sometimes get to candid, if you will.
MR. : We’re hoping that. (Laughter.)
COL. WILKERSON: On the other hand, as a practitioner and as a citizen of this great republic, I kind of believe that I have an obligation to say some of these things, and I believe furthermore that the people’s representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities in this regard and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don’t do something about it, it’s going to get – it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.
Now when the framers began to think about – I say framers; we’re talking about dozens if not hundred of people here, but we’re talking about some minds who were engaged in this. If I cited some names – we don’t need to, but of course you’d probably recognized them – Forestal among – you know, one of them who of course committed suicide. It got too heavy for him.
But these were probably some people who I think rivaled those who got together that hot summer in Philadelphia and put together the Constitution. We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-World War II and World War II itself was a peak, and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that they probably wouldn’t tell you if they were here today – unless they’d had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few – (laughter) – is that they didn’t want another FDR. They did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn’t get one for more than eight years. But they didn’t want the secrecy, they didn’t want the concentration of power, they didn’t want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they’d been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again.
I don’t think even his critics would have argued that FDR wasn’t a brilliant politician and a brilliant leader. But let’s think about it for a moment, if you are one of the framers. How often does America get brilliant leaders? Put them down on paper. I can count them myself on one hand. You can perhaps count them on two hands and make persuasive arguments for the additions. I prefer one hand.
So we need a system of checks and balances and institutional fabric that can withstand anybody – or at least nearly so. (Laughter.) You know, you laugh, but I’m not trying to solicit your laughter. I think it’s a real problem in our democracy. You have to have a system that is so elastic, so resilient, so able to take punches that at one time one branch can supplant another, or one branch can come up and check another. It’s the old business of checks and balances.
If you concentrate power and you do it in a way that is not that different from the way Franklin Roosevelt concentrated it, but you don’t have someone who is brilliant at the utilization of that power, you’ve got problems. You’ve got problems. You may have problems even if you have someone who is brilliant. Go ask people who’ve written about Woodrow Wilson – although I wouldn’t say Woodrow Wilson had concentrated power quite the way FDR did. And of course the war and the depression gave him ample opportunity to do things to abridge civil liberties, for example, that even Abraham Lincoln didn’t go to in a conflict that produced far more casualties and arguably was more passionately fought, certainly in terms of the families of America. But too much power, too much secrecy – they wanted to get rid of that.
They also wanted to institutionalize, more or less, the very thing that had brought about their success in World War II. They wanted to institutional that product, that success, that whatever, and so they wanted to consolidate the armed forces, they wanted to bring them together. They wanted to put one person in charge of those armed forces.
Talk about secrecy – Harry Truman, when he took over in April of 1945, didn’t even know about the atomic bomb. He had had hints because he’d written -- as chairman of the investigating committee in the Senate, he’d written to Stimson, and he had said, “I’ve heard about this land-buying out in Washington; tremendous numbers of acres are being bought. What’s going on?” And Stimson had said, “Please, Mr. Senator, it’s too big for you” – essentially, and Truman had backed off – to give you a sense of the times and the seriousness of what was happening.
But it took Stimson and Leslie Groves, who sneaked in the back door so no one would know he was coming over – and George Marshall didn’t even attend because he was afraid it would bring to much attention to the meeting – and Leslie Groves – Brigadier General Leslie Groves and Stimson briefed the president with essentially two papers in the Oval Office 12 days after he took office, and he found out exactly how serious this was and exactly what he had to deal with in terms of the nation’s nuclear program.
So the process these people were going through was to try and make the system more transparent, make decision-making more transparent, make sharing of information and critical data more the likelihood rather than the exception, and they set about doing this through a legislative process.
Now, you know, how do you legislate that sort of thing? I heard the same thing about Goldwater-Nichols. I heard the same thing over and over again from my armed forces colleagues: you cannot legislate the armed forces into being a team. It’s impossible, you can’t do it. They did it. They did it, and the people who did it did a fantastic job because they didn’t jump through their rear end, like Joe Biden wanted to do when I talked to his staff about something similar to this. They actually went about it in a very concerted, very organized, very disciplined way, and they built the information that they needed in order to make good decisions about how to make the armed forces work together. And it involved everything. It involved education, it involved assignments, it involved the professionalism of the forces. It involved almost every aspect of the armed forces that is crucial to building people up into a team, and they enacted it.
I used to use the 1985 committee print from the Senate on civil-military relations as my text for my students because it was such a brilliant exposition of civil-military relations since the beginning of our country. That’s how good a work they did on that legislation. It wasn’t pull it out of your rear end; it was five, six years in the making. It was superb legislation. Can it be perfected even further? Probably so. People are debating that now. But it was legislation that changed things. We need something like that today.
Now let me tell you why I say that. Decisions that send men and women to die, decisions that have the potential to send men and women to die, decisions that confront situations like natural disasters and cause needless death or cause people to suffer misery that they shouldn’t have to suffer. Domestic and international decisions should not be made in a secret way. That’s a very, very provocative statement, I think. All my life I’ve been taught to guard the nation’s secrets. All my life I have followed the rules. I’ve gone through my special background investigations and all the other things that you need to do, and I understand that the nation’s secrets need guarding, but fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret.
Let me tell you the practical reason – and here I’m jumping over really into both realms, the practical reasons why that’s true. You have probably all read books on leadership: “The Seven Habits of Successful People,” or whatever. If you as a member of the bureaucracy do not participate in a decision, you are not going to carry that decision out with the alacrity, the efficiency and the effectiveness you would if you have participated. When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions, more or less out of the blue, on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well. And furthermore, if you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy as they carry out your decision, you’re courting disaster.
And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. Generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita – and I could go on back – we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it sometimes again. I just use it for a tutoring class for my students down in the District of Columbia. It forced me to read it really closely because we’re doing metaphors and similes and antonyms and synonyms and so forth, and read in there what the founders say in a very different language than we use today. Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.
Now, let me get a little more specific. This is where I'm sure the journalists will get their pens out. (Laughter.) Almost everyone since the ’47 act, with the exception, I think, of Eisenhower, has in some way or another perturbated, flummoxed, twisted, drew evolutionary trends with, whatever, the national security decision-making process. I mean, John Kennedy trusted his brother, who was attorney general – made his brother attorney general – far more than he should have. Richard Nixon, oh my god, took a position that was not even envisioned in the original framers of the act’s minds, national security advisor, and not subject to confirmation by the Senate, advice and consent – took that position and gave it to his secretary of State, concentrating power in ways that still reverberate in this country. Jimmy Carter allowed Zbig Brzezinski to essentially negate his secretary of State.
Now, I could go on and say what Sandy Berger did to Madeline Albright in the realm of foreign policy, and I could make other provocative statements too, but no one, in my study of the act’s implementation, has so flummoxed the process as the present administration. What do I mean by that? Remember what I said about the bureaucracy, if it’s going to implement your decisions, having to participate in those decisions. And let me add one other dimension to that. If you accept the fact – and I do today, and if you’ll look around you at some of these magazine covers – I don’t need any more testimony than that I don’t think – the complexity of crises that confront governments today is just unprecedented. Let me say that again: The complexity of the crises that confront governments today are just unprecedented.
At the same time, especially in America – but I submit to you in Japan, in China, and in a number of other countries soon to be probably the European Union, it’s just as bad, if not in some ways worse -- the complexity of governing is unprecedented. You simply cannot deal with all the challenges that government has to deal with, meet all the demands that government has to meet in the modern age, in the 21st century, without admitting that it is hugely complex. That doesn’t mean you have to add a Department of Homeland Security with 70,000 disparate entities thrown under somebody in order to handle them, but it does mean that your bureaucracy has got to be staffed with good people, and they’ve got to work together, and they’ve got to work under leadership they trust and leadership that on basic issues they agree with, and that if they don’t agree, they can dissent and dissent and dissent. And if their dissent is such that they feel so passionate about it, they can resign and know why they’re resigning.
That is not the case today. And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don’t know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.
Read George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker – reporter for the New Yorker, has got it right. I just finished it, and I usually put marginalia in a book, but let me tell you, I had to get extra pages to write on. (Laughter.) And I wish I had been able to help George Packer write that book. In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics than he’s got. (Laughter.) But if you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book.
In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. It all happened because of the end of the Cold War. Harlan will tell you how many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department did we have in 1988 and how many do we have now? And they’re always working together.
If one of them is a lead on the satellite program – I hope there’s some Lockheed and Grumman and others here today, Raytheon – if one of them is a lead on satellites, the others are subs. And they’ve learned their lesson; they’re in every state. They’ve got every congressman, every senator. They’ve got it covered. Now, that’s not to say that they aren’t smart businessmen. They are – and women – they are. But it’s something we should be looking at, something we should be looking at.
So you’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of Defense and the vice president, and you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either. And so it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this what I call Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you’d thought were made in the formal process. Now, let’s get back to Dr. Rice again. For so long I said, yeah, Rich, you’re right – Rich being Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage – it is a dysfunctional process. And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat; who’s causing this? Well, the national security adviser. Even if the framers didn’t envision that position, even if it’s not subject to confirmation by the Senate, the national security advisor should be doing a better job. Now I’ve come to a different conclusion, and after reading Packer’s book I found additional information, or confirmation for my opinion, I think. I think it was more a case of – in some cases there was real dysfunctionality – there always is – but in most cases it was Dr. Rice made a decision, she made a decision – and this is all about people again because people in essence are the government. She made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president.
And so what we had was a situation where the national security advisor, seen in the evolution over some half-century since the act as the balancer or the person who would make sure all opinions got to the president, the person who would make sure that every dissent got to the president that made sense – not every one but the ones that made sense – actually was a part of the problem, and probably on many issues sided with the president and the vice president and the secretary of Defense. And so what you had – and here I am the academic again – you had this incredible process where the formal process, the statutory process, the policy coordinating committee, the deputies committee, the principal’s committee, all camouflaged – the dysfunctionality camouflaged the efficiency of the secret decision-making process.
And so we got into Iraq, and so George Packer quotes Richard Haas in his book as saying, “To this day I still don’t know why we went to war in Iraq.” I can go through all the things we listed, from WMD to human rights to – I can go through it – terrorism, but I really can’t sit here and tell you, George, why we went to war in Iraq. And there are so many decisions. Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to say we at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran? Why did we create the national director of intelligence and add further to the bureaucracy, which was what caused the problem in the first place? The problem is not sharing information. The problem is not that we don’t have enough feet on the ground or enough people collecting intelligence or enough $40 billion eyes in the sky – national technical means. That’s not the problem. The problem is our people don’t share. The problem is the FBI is over here in its niche, and the CIA is over here, and INR is here, and Treasury is here, and the DIA is here, and the NSA is here, and the NRO is here, and god almighty, they never talk to each other. They don’t share. They don’t pass information around. They don’t work in the same cultures. They don’t have the same attitude about the information they’re handling, sometimes for good reason. Some are domestic law enforcement; some are not.
There are all kinds of problems that need to be dealt with and we are not going to make it into the 21st century very far and keep our power intact and our powder dry if we don’t start to deal with this need to change the decision-making process, and an understanding of that need, which, for whatever reason, intuitive or intellectual I don’t know, I’ll give credit to the Bush administration for, by suddenly concentrating power in one tiny little aspect of the federal government and letting that little cabal make the decisions. That’s not a recipe for success. It’s a recipe for good decision-making in terms of the speed and alacrity with which you can make decisions, of course. Harlan and I can sit down and we can make a decision probably a lot faster than all of you and me can make a decision, but if all of you bring something to the fight and will be integral in the implementation of the decision I’m going to make, and if you know some things I don’t know and you might dissent because of those things you know, I damn well better listen to you, and I better figure out a way to get all of you to work together if we finally come to a decision and we decide to implement that. I better know how to get you to work together.
That is not what this administration did for four years. Instead it made decisions in secret, and now I think it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret. But far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences. You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences, whether it is a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or whether it is the situation in Iraq, which still goes unexplained. You know, if I had the time I could stand up here today I think and make a strategic case for why we are in Iraq and why we have to stay there and we have to get it right. As Winston Churchill said, “America will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities.” (Laughter.) Well, we need to get busy and exhaust them and do the right thing.
We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t. I can make that case. No one in this administration has made that case. They have simply pontificated. That’s all they’ve done. Now, I’m not evaluating the decision to go to war. That’s a different matter. But we’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn’t leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put 5 million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That’s what we’ll have to do. So why not get it right now? Why not get it right now? I don’t see any signs, other than signs of desperation – that is to say, the polls are falling, people are finally listening, to a certain extent, to the evidence that’s building up, and so people are getting desperate. And so Dr. Rice gets some more flexibility, some more leeway, and we do this and we do that; that looks diplomatic. But I don’t see anything that looks coordinated because I think the decisions are still being made essentially in that small group.
And I’ll finish just by bringing it down screechingly to the ground and tell you that the detainee abuse issue is just such a concrete example of what I’ve just described to you, that 10 years from now or so when it’s really, really put to the acid test, ironed out and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen. I don’t know how many people saw the “Frontline” documentary last night – very well done, I thought, but didn’t get anywhere near the specifics that need to be shown, that need to come out, that need to say to the American people, this is not us, this is not the way we do business in the world. Of course we have criminals, of course we have people who violate the law of war, of course we had My Lai, of course we had problems in the Korean War and in World War II. My father-in-law was involved in the Malmédy massacre and the retaliation of U.S. troops in Belgium. He told me some stories before he died that made my blood curdle about American troops killing Germans.
But these are not -- I won’t say isolated incidents; these are incidents that are understandable and that ultimately, at one time or another, we came to deal with. I don’t think, in our history, we’ve ever had a presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general involvement in telling our troops essentially carte blanche is the way you should feel. You should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict. Well, I’ll admit that. I’ll admit that. I don’t want to see any of these people ever released from prison if they’re truly terrorists. I don’t want to see them released because I know what they’ll do. I’m a former military man, 31 years in the Army. They will go out and they will try to kill me and my buddies, again and again, and some of you people, too.
So I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we make a radical change in the nature of America. But that’s what we did, and we did it in private. We did it in such privacy that the secretary of State had to open the door into my office one day – we had adjoining offices and he liked to do that, and I never objected – he came through the door and he said, Larry, Larry, get everything, get all the paperwork, get the ICRC reports, get everything; I think this is going to be a real mess. And Will Taft, his lawyer, got the same instruction from a legal point of view. And Will and I worked together for almost a year as the ICRC reports began to build and come in, and Kellenberger even came in and visited with the secretary of State. And we knew that things weren’t the way they should be, and as former soldiers, we knew that you don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it – unless you’ve condoned it. And whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant. If you did it at all, indirectly, implicitly, tacitly – you pick the word – you’re in trouble because that slippery slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation, and we’ll probably have to grow a new military.
We may have to do that anyway because my army right now is truly in bad shape – truly in bad shape. And I’m not talking about the billions and billions of dollars of equipment it’s burning up in Iraq at a rate 10 or 15 times the rate its life cycle said it should be burned up at, but I’m also talking about when you have officers who have to hedge the truth, NCOs who have to hedge the truth. They start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam, my war. They come home and they tell their wife they’ve got to go back for the third tour and the fourth tour and the wife says, uh-uh, or the husband says, uh-uh, and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel. And the signs are very concrete right now that the Army and the Marine Corps – to a lesser extent the other services because they’re not quite as involved in the deployments that we’re talking about here and the frequency thereof, the op tempo as we say it – problems are brewing. Problems are brewing.
So I’ll just close by saying that when I met Biden’s staff and Hagel’s staff, the Lugar staff, and others know that I was available for whatever I could contribute, for however long they needed me to write whatever we called it – the Lugar-Biden Act, the Biden-Lugar Act. I don’t care what we called it, but it would be a piece of legislation that would attempt to do for the federal bureaucracy what we had done for the armed forces. Okay. Impossible task? Okay. Impossible task, we’ve got to try it. We have got to try it. We have got to do better than we’re doing today.
I was at – I’ll close with a function I was at yesterday, the Yoshiyama Awards for the Hitachi Foundation, 10 of the brightest, bubbliest, exciting seniors from across the country that I’ve ever been associated with. This is the second time I’ve attended the awards and it was the same way last year. And these are not National Merit Scholars. These are not GPA 4.0, these are not Princeton-bound kids – although some of them probably are, this is not what’s heralded about them. They’re kids who come together because they’ve done community service. And the chairman of the board of the Hitachi Foundation was introducing them and he said, you know, the best way I can describe these kids to you is that you or I would confront the challenges, the problems that they’ve confronted and we would say, ain’t no way, politically impossible, or something like that. These kids have said, I’m going to do it, and they’ve done it.
I made a suggestion, for example, that a young major up at the Naval War College who had written a paper, and he put the specifics in it – I mean, really put the specifics to it that we ought to merge the State and Defense Departments, that what we ought to have is an undersecretary for East Asia, an undersecretary for Europe and so forth, like we have assistant secretaries now – regional undersecretaries – and they ought to co-locate with the CINCs, the combatant commanders as we say today, the military proconsuls who are stationed around the world in Honolulu and other places, and make the undersecretary the boss and make the combatant commander his deputy, merge the State and Defense Departments. Holy mackerel – (laughter) – you know? But as the chairman of the board of the Hitachi Foundation said yesterday, one of these kids would say, you know, let’s get to work. Let’s get to work.
We need some people on the Hill who look at the challenge of reformatting, reorganizing, whatever, our interagency process, our federal bureaucracy to meet the challenges of the 21st century. We need somebody on the Hill like that. We need somebody who’s energetic. While they’re about it they need to also investigate and then do a major revision of their own processes. And don’t get me started on that one. Thanks you.
(Applause.)
MR. CLEMONS: Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much, Larry. I know there are going to be lots and lots of questions. I’m going to ask the audience, after I offer my own question, to pick one of the many you have. We’re going to work through a lot so we’re going to work on brevity – and I’m going to break my own rule. One is, have you paid any price for your candor, one; and two, when Colin Powell spoke – made his presentation at the United Nations on the WMD issue, was that your attempt to play ball and was the price you were trying to extract from the administration an attempt to get the process of inclusion fixed? Because otherwise, given what you’ve just said, Colin Powell’s presentation makes no sense unless he thought that he was trying to rearrange the players, so to speak, and to demand different treatment for both his role and other player’s role in the decision-making process.
COL. WILKERSON: Yes, I have paid a price, and it’s a high price for me. I’ve paid the price that Colin Powell and I see eye to eye a lot less than we used to. Now, that’s not to say that that wasn’t the case a lot of times anyway. The great respect I have for the man emanates as much from his ability to tolerate me in my many dissenting opinions as it does for any leadership qualities that he’s otherwise shown me, which were manifold. But at the end, I actually was physically thrown out of his office on one occasion, and that was a first in 16 years.
It showed, I think, his exasperation and it showed his tolerance level had sunk considerably for dissenting opinions. He’s not happy – I think that’s fair to say – with my speaking out because – and I admire this in him too – he is the world’s most loyal soldier and feels that his inveterate optimism is right and that we will overcome these problems. And I share that. However, I feel like as a citizen and as a person very much concerned with the military – it was my old home – I need to speak out.
Now, on the other matter, I’ve been over that so many times in my head and with hundreds of journalists who are trying to figure it out for themselves – I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios. Carl Ford and I talked; Tom Finger and I talked, who is now John Negroponte’s deputy, and that was the way INR felt. And, frankly, I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software. That is to say there are some discs or there were some scientists and so forth but he hadn’t reconstituted it. He was going to wait until the international tension was off of him, until the sanctions were down, and then he was going to go back – certainly go back to all of his programs. I mean, I was convinced of that.
But I saw satellite evidence, and I’ve looked at satellite pictures for much of my career. I saw information that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was spoofing us, was giving us disinformation. When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore.
Well, Saddam Hussein really cared about deterring the Persians – the Iranians – and his own people. He didn’t give a hang about us except on occasion. And so he had to convince those audiences that he still was a powerful man. So who better to do that through than the INC, Ahmad Chalabi and his boys, and by spoofing our eyes in the sky and our little HUMINT, and the Brits and the French and the Germans, too. That’s all I can figure.
The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were delivering – which we had called considerably – we had called it very much – we had thrown whole reams of paper out that the White House had created. But George was convinced, John McLaughlin was convinced that what we were presented was accurate. And contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French. In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.
In fact, I’ll just cite one more thing. The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? We were wrong. We were wrong.
MR. CLEMONS: Thank you.
We’re going to work with microphones and we’re going to have it here in the back. I’m going to start with Harlan Ullman then Allan Gerson in the back, then we’ll work around the room.
Harlan?
Q: Larry, thanks very much, and I want to say I share your optimism as well as your views. Two observations and then a quick question. First, I would just suggest that all presidents are secret: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.
COL. WILKERSON: Yep.
Q: Kennedy was among the worst. Then of course there was Dick Nixon. And you remember we had a guy called Yeoman Radford that was stealing NSC stuff because Henry wouldn’t share it with the Pentagon.
Second, I also think that the cabal really has a leader and the leader is George W. Bush, and I think that it’s the president who’s driving the ship of state. We had a referendum about a year ago and the public decided they would go with him, not with the other guy.
My question is this: I agree with you entirely that the absence of responsibility, authority, and most of all accountability is dereliction of duty in the highest degree. What would you do to try to reestablish some degree of responsibility, authority and accountability in both branches of government?
COL. WILKERSON: Well, I can’t resist the first part of your question. The criticism that has come at me from colleagues in academia and other places is that, so what’s new, which is essentially what you just said. Every president has done this or that. I think there are several things that are new. First of all, what I said about the complexity of the crises we face, the complexity of governance and so forth. And we’ve done something about this. We no longer have the patronage system that we once had, we no longer have, you know, you will be the postmaster in – over time, in an evolutionary way, we’ve done some things about the vestiges of corruption, if you will, or whatever.
The other reason – again, I spoke to it but I’ll elaborate a bit – I really think we have to protect ourselves against institutional imperfections, and in particular we have to protect ourselves against the institutions of humans and the imperfections that they bring. And the way you do that, in my view anyway, is with firm laws. They’re not perfect. Goldwater-Nichols isn’t perfect but – and Harry Truman might say it this way, and really diligent oversight. And if you’re going to exercise diligent oversight, then you better damn well have your own act together in terms of exercising that oversight. Eight committees had to be reported to by Colin Powell at the State Department – eight committees. He had to go give eight testimonies on his budget every year in order to get the money for the State Department. That’s ridiculous. I’m told Homeland Security’s reporting requirements – 88? Oh, my god.
So Congress needs to reorganize. That might be where I would start if I was king for a day. Congress needs to reorganize. The executive branch is not organized optimally either, and I’m not sure – you know, I really have trouble saying this sometimes but I’ll be provocative again. I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore except in the minds of the Foreign Service. Yes, we have embassies around the world, and if you’ve been to one lately you know they look like concertina-wired Abu Ghraibs. They send a terrible signal. I was in one in Honduras that just – if I don’t watch out I’ll show my liberal leanings here. (Chuckles.) I’m not sure the State Department is effective anymore. And maybe the Congress realizes that and that’s the reason their budget is so low, that’s the reason they’re so small. Blue ribbon panels and other things have said, this ought to be done, that ought to be done. You know, Admiral Crowe had some really strong recommendations about consolidation efficiencies and so forth.
I’m not sure, unless you can figure out a way to link the most lethal instrument we have, without militarizing ourselves too much. And our foreign policy, I’m not sure you can get around the non-utility of the State Department. So I would seek a way to revitalize what I call the diplomatic instrument. And it’s not just money. It’s not just money.
Another thing – hold on, let me get one more out. Another thing, I think we really need to take a look at the national security advisor position. As I said, it’s not a position that was envisioned by the framers. It’s a position that has become immensely powerful. It’s a position that’s very personal. It’s a position that would be very difficult to get the executive branch to subject to the advice and consent of the Senate because it is that, and that would delete that somewhat, but I, nonetheless, think we ought to take a look at that position, and if you’d like to get together after, I’ve got some other –
MR. CLEMONS: In the very back, Allan Gerson.
Q: Thank you. I wonder if I could follow up on Steve’s earlier question about the price of candor. This is something that you’ve wrestled with, I’m sure, and I’m really interested in the limits of candor. How free are you – how free did you – what did you think you were free to say when you went public? Where do you draw the line? Is the line drawn where you think the government acted illegally in violation of some laws, and can you speak out publicly the way you do even though you’ve been in government and been privy to so much private discussions, when you think the policy is wrong or there is ineptitude? At what point can you go public?
Now, the other question I have is you began your presentation by lauding the Bush 41 administration, and I wonder if you could point to any evidence that the kind of secrecy that you see – that you argue we see in this administration was not really practiced by the Bush 41 administration in making decisions such as, for example, the invasion of Panama. Who was informed in the bureaucracy and wasn’t this also done just at the very top by two people?
COL. WILKERSON: Good questions, all. The first one is a difficult – I feel like being glib and saying, when your wife tells you – of 40 years tells you that you have responsibilities beyond your loyalty to the man you’ve worked for for 16 years, and admire greatly – that’s a glib answer. A less-than-glib answer is I think when you feel like what you might say has even a remote opportunity to affect some change for the good, that’s sort of my personal criteria.
On the other question, I think what George H.W. Bush did in the short four years that he was in office was just phenomenal. Let’s start – I mean, let’s just begin the discussion with the reunification of Germany. When I say “secretive” I don’t necessarily mean exposed to the full public glare on the front page of both – the full right side of the Washington Post. I mean the leaders involved in it, the allies involved in it, and those who will be impacted by it, largely in this case the Russians, are not only consulted but asked for their opinion, and even have evidence to take back with them that their opinion was not just listened to but the better points – and there are almost always good points in even the Russian’s presentation – have been implemented, or seem to be being implemented.
There’s a whole road of difference, a huge interstate of difference, between diplomacy conducted with all the parties that might be impacted by the results of that diplomacy and decisions that train and then a decision being made than a decision being made and foisted on the world, as it were.
The mayor of Beijing made a speech at Yale back in 2004, May I think it was, and he sort of comically suggested that the Chinese ought to have a vote in November 2004. And he said, I think it ought to be about 20 percent. That’s the way the world looks at America. That’s the way even the mayor of Beijing looks at America: When you make decisions, superpower, they affect me. Kim Campbell, the former prime minister, at the panel we had, she said, we’re not anti-American, we’re scared; we’re scared to death the giant has no head. You’re in the world and you have no head. Well, I could have been very cynical and looked back at Kim and said – because I have the experience to say it – well, as long as you sit behind our military up there in Canada, don’t do a damn thing, eviscerate your own military and continue to look like you’re the world’s pacifist nation, you’re getting what you deserve. That’s not what I said to her.
When you put your feet up on a hassock and look at a man who’s won the Nobel Prize and is currently the president of South Korea, and tell him in a very insulting way that you don’t agree with his assessment of what’s necessary to be reconciled with the north, that’s not diplomacy, that’s cowboyism. And I went to high school in Houston – I’ve got some connections with Texas. But there’s just a vast difference between the way George Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and affected positive results, in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.
I like to use the world gracelessness, and I use that word because grace is something we have lost in the modern world. It’s a very important product. It’s very different, for example, to walk in with a foreign leader and find something you can be magnanimous about. You don’t have to win everything. You don’t have to be the big bully on the block. Find something you can be magnanimous about, that you can give him, that you can say he gets credit for, or she gets credit for. That’s diplomacy. That’s diplomacy. You don’t walk in and say, I’m the big mother on the block and if everybody’s not with me, they’re against me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The difference between father and son, in my mind, sort of comes from that attitudinal approach to the world.
Yes?
MR. CLEMONS: I’m going to do it with the mikes because we’ve got to get on – (inaudible). Jacob Halpren (sp).
Q: Hi, just a quick question. I actually don’t agree with your assessment of Doug Feith. I think the interesting thing about him is not that he –
COL. WILKERSON: It wasn’t mine; it was Tommy Franks’.
(Laughter.)
Q: Right, but he’s actually quite intelligent. What he also is is a zealot. And that makes me wonder, how is it that Dick Cheney, who was described to me by someone who worked with him in a senior post in the Pentagon in the first Bush administration as prudent, cautious. He said to me, I don’t recognize Dick Cheney anymore. How did Cheney go down this path as well?
COL. WILKERSON: Well, there are a number of people who have asked me that a question and a number of people have offered their observations who are in a better position than I to make that judgment. I knew Secretary Cheney when he was the secretary of Defense, and he was, in my view, a good secretary of Defense. He would make a decision on a dime, and if you didn’t give him the material to make a decision with he’d send you away. Good executive – 9/11 changed his entire approach to business, I think. Some people have called it paranoia, some people have called it not having enough – sort of the ivory tower complex, not having enough contact with the real world on a daily basis to understand how things are going or how things are building or how tension is being handled.
But I think – if I had to put my finger on it and I was having to bet on it or something I would say that Dick Cheney saw 9/11, saw the potential for another 9/11, particularly one with a nuclear weapon or some other mass destruction device, and suddenly became so fixated on that problem, not without some legitimacy, that it skewed and bent some of the other approaches and decisions that he made. That’s my interpretation.
MR. CLEMONS: Dave Colton (ph).
Q: Colonel, I was struck by, excuse me, the academic portion of your presentation, which was fairly structural in political science terms, and looked at the morphology of decision-making, who was included, et cetera. I’d like to throw out an idea and get your reaction to it, which is to take this presentation today up another 10 (thousand), 15,000 feet and suggest to you that the phenomena you observed is emblematic of decision-making across the government today, whether it be domestic politics – I’m up on the Hill a lot. And the fundamental strata I would suggest to you is not so much personalities, although they’re important; it’s the fact that most people do not seem to recognize what this gentleman hinted at, which is the presence of radical ideology. You had at one time –
COL. WILKERSON: You need to make it briefer; I don’t have enough time.
Q: One last question.
COL. WILKERSON: Yeah, just finish it.
Q: Here’s the point: Colonel, could you address the ideologicalization of American politics and leadership and the fact that institutions like the Republican Party, Hagel being obviously an outrider, have been radicalized. Lenin said, peace, bread, land, the dictatorship of the proletariat. How would your reforms for the CINCs, all these structural things, work when the governing apparatus has been contaminated, if you will, with a viral ideology?
COL. WILKERSON: Well, my answer, you might expect, presupposes I agree with your idea that we’ve been contaminated in that way. While there has been a serious attempt to do that, I’m not one who agrees that we are driven entirely by ideology now. If you’re going to talk Republican and Democratic Party, now, that’s a different ballgame. If we’re going to talk the current administration as I knew it from the years that I knew it and have insights on it today, I don’t think ideology drives them as much as the press and mass media in general and others would have it.
I do agree with your point that Douglas Feith was driven by ideology, and others in the administration. I don’t think Dick Cheney is driven by ideology. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld is. If you mean by ideology a certain nationalism or a certain realism or whatever, perhaps, but not by what we associated with neoconservatism. So I can’t address your question is a straightforward way – I’d like to – because I don’t agree that we’ve been contaminated. I do agree that it’s been a problem. I do agree that some people have advocated policies that have more or less been implemented strictly on the basis of ideology, and because those decisions were not exposed to the full glare of light – they should have been – they therefore got implemented.
But I don’t think that’s the fundamental problem of implementation. I think the fundamental problem is a broken bureaucracy and an inability to do the kinds of things that you need to do in the 21st century to succeed.
MR. CLEMONS: My colleague, Anatol Lieven.
Q: Thank you, sir, for a most interesting talk. Could I ask you to expand on one point? You said that if America withdraws from Iraq today or tomorrow we would have to go back in 10 years’ time and basically re-conquer the Middle East. Could you explain why you think that that’s the case? And could I ask you also to say, is there a way, in your view, whereby America could draw down its presence and its interests in the region while continuing to defend its most vital interests worldwide? Thank you.
COL. WILKERSON: Let me take the second part first. I’m guardedly optimistic about what’s happening there now. I think we may have reached the point, as I said earlier, where we’ve exhausted all the possibilities and we’re actually listening to the Iraqis, we actually are in the ministries that we need to be in, listening to who is in charge of those ministries, and we’re doing the kinds of things that are necessary to be done to leave at least something that’s very different and not inimical to our interests in Baghdad, in Iraq in general, as we do leave – leave over the next five to eight years. Now, that’s a fairly long timeframe. And I admire the president – for whatever reasons, I don’t know, he hasn’t intellectualized them; I think that’s a shortcoming – for sticking to that sort of a timeframe and that sort of an attitude about the whole Iraq problem.
There are a number of reasons why I believe that this is strategic in a sense that Vietnam was not. Vietnam was a misinterpretation, in my view, of a Cold War side battle that really wasn’t a Cold War side battle except in a superficial aspect. It really was a civil war. And the French misinterpreted, because of their colonial remnants, and we misinterpreted it because of our fixation on the Cold War, although I have some very provocative opinions about what we could have done in Vietnam if we’d stuck it out too. Nonetheless, Vietnam was not something that when we left, however with honor or without, we were going to have to revisit 10 years later because it was so strategic. I think Iraq is.
When I talk with my Turkish colleagues, for example, I really think Iraq is. One of the things the Turks are most perturbed about today, for example, is our inability to do anything about the PKK. Our inability to do anything about the PKK is not just because Secretary Rumsfeld doesn’t want to do anything about the PKK or because Douglas Feith thought that the PKK would be a good ally. It’s because he doesn’t have enough troops. He doesn’t have enough troops to do anything about the PKK. But the PKK disturbs the Turks, and I don’t have too much problem envisioning the Turks taking over at least the top third of Iraq were we to leave a mess. I don’t have a problem with the Syrians then becoming involved, the Iranians t
In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
“The Code of the Warrior: in History, Myth, and Everyday Life”
Was hunting, then, the key to human evolution? By the 1960s, many anthropologists seemed to think so. At a well-attended conference on the subject of Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago in 1966, anthropologist William Laughlin claimed that “hunting is the master behavior patter of the human species.” Hunting, he said, involved much more than simply killing animals for food. It meant mastering a complex curriculum that included an intimate knowledge of land, plants, animal behavior, animal anatomy, strategy, and the skillful use of weapons. Hunting, as Laughlin said, “placed a premium upon inventiveness, upon problem solving.” In addition, it provided strong evolutionary incentives for learning, since it was dangerous and risky – it “imposed,” as Laughlin put, “a real penalty for failure to solve the problem.”
In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.
This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
Hunting was a game of chance. The hunter might throw and miss, or the spear might hit but not kill, and the animal might escape, taking the spear and the hours or days of stalking with it. Or, cornered and fighting for its life, the quarry might turn and strike out with rage and fury. It was at this moment, when life faced life, that the hunter’s courage or bravery – his willingness to risk all on a throw of a spear – was called into play.
Having learned to identify with the lives of animals, and given the nearly eye-to-eye closeness necessary for killing, it is likely that hunters would also identify with the deaths of animals. The mammals killed, butchered, and eaten by human hunters were in most ways similar to human beings – indeed the red blood animals shed was indistinguishable from human blood.
Though man had become the most dangerous of predators, he was a predator who knew what he was doing. He knew, to begin with, what death was, or at the very least he knew that death was, at least since the arrival of the Neanderthals forty thousand or so years ago. An excavation at the cave of La-Chappelle-aux-Saints in France revealed tools – all of which suggest the familiar practice of supplying the dead with provisions for a journey. At Shanidar, a later Neanderthal site in a cave in what is now Turkey, pollen analysis of the soil revealed that at least eight species of brightly colored wild flowers had been laid over the body which lay on a bed of branches.
For death was, and is, the great mystery. In its simplest and most direct form, death asks, Where has the life that was present before death gone? What has become of life?
The answer, again in its simplest and most direct form, is that life has gone away; it has gone somewhere else. This held for any being with life, including the hunter’s quarry.
“Every good hunter,” says Ortega y Gasset, “is uneasy in the depth of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanted animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite.”
It is this uneasiness that is sung by the Akoa Pygmies while placing a garland around the tusks of a freshly killed elephant:
Our spear strayed from its course.
O Father Elephant!
We didn’t mean to kill you,
We didn’t mean to hurt you,
O Father Elephant!
It wasn’t the warrior who took your life,
Your hour had come,
Don’t come back to trample down our huts…
Don’t be angry with us.
From now on your life will be better,
You live in the land of the Spirits,
Our fathers will go with you to renew their bond,
You live in the land of the Spirits.
The government fails, time and time again, and it is due to its massive size, politics, hubris, incompetance, and graft.
While I wasn't blogging when the Department of Homeland Security was created, I stated in web forums and email lists that creating that department was nothing but a waste of time and money.
If its main job was to prevent another 9/11, all that had to be done was to add a cabinet position to head over seeing of the different 3 letter agencies to make sure that they share information in a timely and efficient manner. Then all that had to be done was to give that position the authority to fire people at will and remove regulations that prevented information from being shared. That position should also have had an inside track to be able to go to congress and state what laws needed to be changed or removed to bring down the legal barriers between the different 3 letter agencies.
Note: Some of those laws are the reason for "The Wall" and those laws are on the books because of prior abuses by the different 3 letter agencies. I know this, but some of the resulting regulations were a burden.
As anyone should be able to see right now, putting FEMA under Homeland Defense was a stupid move. And putting Brown in charge of FEMA was also a stupid move. Yes, it was everyday politics, but the man is in over his head.
Before the hurricane, the mayor of New Orleans said that because of the size of the hurricane, the people of NOLA would be essentially on their own. After the hurricane hit, he was on the air, rightly, blasting lack of a response from the federal government.
Well, he should have included local government and state government in that, but he didn't.
Note: I'm on the road again and I just don't feel like web surfing to find the links to back what I'm writing. Yeah, I'm lazy, cranky, my head hurts, and I ate some bad airport food that is tearing my stomach up. So go look for it for yourself.
The local and state authorities told those who couldn't get out to go to the Super Dome. They did. Then they were subject to searches before being allowed to enter the Dome. The local authorites in the Dome, apparently, couldn't do anything about the criminals who entered the Dome and took advantage of the situation. They should have let people keep knives and such.
Note: I've started to question what is being reported about the crime. Not because of race issues, but because of things like this. Yeah, I linked it. It's in another tab right now, that's why.
Trying to get back on track....
The local and state government failed those who couldn't get out. They failed the hospitals. When the local police were in search and rescue mode, they let the looters rules, so they failed to protect those who needed protecting.
The authorities are sending children without parents or guardians to locations outside of LA. Now you have parentless children, possibly STATES away from their family. Children are being harmed while being saved. This is like foster care. When it goes right, it goes right. When it goes wrong, the foster care system destroys families and harms kids. (Don't. Even. Get. Me. Going. About. The. Foster. Care. System).
There is a radio interview being played on talk radio concerning a woman who is relaying her experience with FEMA. FEMA asked her for an address. She has none. They asked her for her telephone number. She has none. She was calling from a temporary space set up by Allstate. The location? A field. They asked for a fax number. She had none.
Oh, and let us not forget about the NOLA evacuation plan that called for buses to be used to transport people out of The Big Easy. Instead, they are flooded.
That's the government in action.
The government is best at confiscating money from tax payers. But otherwise, people should consider to be on your own and operate from that premise.
If you didn't know before, now you know.
And to anyone who is surprised by what I'm writing, it's because you never asked, otherwise I would have told you something like this before.
AJC reports black conservative coonshow du jour;
"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation," Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.""You've got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that's supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering."
"Any problem people may have with his charity, Long said, was rooted in some people's expectations that pastors should be poor.
"I would love to sit with you and walk with you through the Bible to show that Jesus wasn't poor," he said.
His congregation is inspired by seeing its pastor do well, Long said.
"I'm not going to apologize for anything. ... "
In 1995, Bishop Eddie Long established a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity to help the needy and spread the gospel.
But it was Long, leader of the largest church congregation in Georgia, who became the charity's biggest beneficiary.
The charity, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries Inc., provided him with at least $3.07 million in salary, benefits and the use of property between 1997 and 2000 — nearly as much as it gave to all other recipients combined during those years, tax records show.
It is one of at least 20 nonprofit and for-profit corporations that Long founded after becoming pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in 1987. Long's businesses include a music publishing company and a transportation service.
The charity's compensation to Long over that four-year period included:
•A $1.4 million six-bedroom, nine-bath home on 20 acres in Lithonia.
•Use of a $350,000 luxury Bentley automobile.
•More than $1 million in salary, including $494,000 in 2000.
Long said the charity, which reported that it stopped doing business after 2000, did not solicit donations from New Birth members. It reported that its income included royalties, speaking fees and several large donations.
The charity made $3.1 million in donations to others between 1997 and 2000, the records show, but they did not contain any itemized breakdown of the donations, as required by the Internal Revenue Service.
Nonprofit groups are exempt from paying state and federal income taxes if they meet certain criteria. In return, the federal tax code says their executives' benefits may not be excessive.
Long and his wife, Vanessa, were two of the charity's four board members. The charity gave a third board member, Terrance Thornton, a $160,000 loan in 1999 to buy a home site across the street from Long's house, tax records show.
Long's tax attorney, J. David Epstein, said an independent compensation committee, along with a second committee within New Birth and a national accounting firm, oversaw those decisions. He declined to identify the firm or members of the committees.
Long, 52, defended his compensation during an interview about his charity. He's transformed New Birth, based in Lithonia, from a 300-member church to a 25,000-member megachurch with a global presence, according to the church's Web site.
"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation," Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.
"You've got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that's supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering."
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of a Senate committee investigating lavish salaries of nonprofit executives, said leaders of tax-exempt organizations must be responsible for the public trust they've been given.
"I'm worried that a few people are confusing the ringing of a church bell with the ringing of a cash register," Grassley said in a statement in response to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's inquiries about the charity. "When I hear about leaders of charities being provided a $300,000 Bentley to drive around in, my fear is that it's the taxpayers who subsidize this charity who are really being taken for a ride."
As the popularity of televangelism, traveling religious shows and megachurches has skyrocketed, so has the money their leaders can earn. IRS enforcement of compensation rules has been light, and the agency rarely audits nonprofit groups.
In 2002 and 2003, TV evangelist and author Joyce Meyer had compensation packages of up to $900,000 approved by her ministry's board, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Bishop T.D. Jakes, who staged MegaFest in Atlanta this summer, has a $1.7 million mansion in Dallas, according to Time magazine.
With few exceptions, the public rarely gets a glimpse at religious leaders' compensation because churches are not required to file tax returns. Information on Long's salary and benefits was derived from the charity's tax returns, which are public records.
Churches must report to the IRS how much they pay employees, but those records are not public.
Long's charity and his church were separate organizations. The charity was incorporated under federal law as a nonprofit religious corporation — not a church — subject to rules to ensure accountability and prevent enrichment of executives at the public expense.
Churches and nonprofits are required to follow the same IRS rules regarding compensation. The IRS tax guide for churches and religious organizations says that neither group may "provide a substantial benefit to private interests," and their net earnings "may not [benefit] any individual." They are allowed to pay their executives "reasonable compensation."
"In general, an individual(s) salary and benefits should not be excessive and must be approved by the majority of board of directors who are unpaid and not related to the individual(s)," said IRS spokesman Mark Green in a statement.
Long's benefits went beyond reasonable compensation, said Jeff Krehely, deputy director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a Washington-based group that promotes accountability in the philanthropic community.
"After reviewing the compensation packages of foundation executives — including those who have been written up in the press as being excessive — I've never seen anything quite like what Long [was] getting, when you include his salary, the house and the car," Krehely said.
Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney and former director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Division, was retained by Long to look over Bishop Eddie Long Ministries as a result of inquiries about the charity.
Owens released a statement saying, "The Ministry has a comprehensive system of internal controls and policies in place that ensure that all funds are accounted for and spent for appropriate purposes under the tax code." He declined to elaborate or answer questions about the operation of the charity from 1997 to 2000.
'Touch a lot of people'
Long, accompanied by two attorneys and two publicists, talked about his charity in a conference room at New Birth's sprawling campus in south DeKalb County. He declined to answer most questions about his charity's financial transactions, leaving those responses to his attorney. He and Epstein later declined to answer follow-up questions, including whether Long had reported the house on his personal income tax return.
The church, dubbed "Club New Birth" because of the abundance of young black single professionals who attend its services, includes a school that goes through ninth grade, a fitness center and a 10,000-seat sanctuary, opened in 2001.
The church also ministers to drug addicts and prisoners, helped start a credit union near South DeKalb Mall, and has been involved in religious revivals as far away as New Zealand and Kenya.
"We touch a lot of people," Long said. "This is a world-impacting ministry, and I personally get a little offended when my integrity is questioned."
Long has drawn criticism before. In December, he and Bernice King, younger daughter of the late Martin Luther King Jr., led a march from the King Center promoting several causes. Critics said the civil rights leader would never have agreed to the march's call for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
A black conservative, Long calls himself one of God's "scarred leaders," someone God uses despite moral lapses that included being fired from a job for lying on an expense report.
Long established the charity as a nonprofit religious corporation in 1995. Incorporation papers filed in New York said its purpose was spreading the gospel and that no part "of its assets, income or profit" would be distributed to any directors of the charity except for "reasonable payment."
Epstein said it was created for Long to coordinate his charitable activities, including mission trips overseas and donations to churches and orphans.
But later, the charity's compensation committee decided to use some of the charity's assets to pay Long for his work at New Birth to make up for many years when he had been underpaid, Epstein said. Long had told his charity's compensation committee previously that he didn't want to be paid the maximum amount available to him, Epstein said.
"It was appropriate to do something to make a dent in the compensation that the bishop hadn't received," Epstein said.
"Bishop Long has never received the legal amount of compensation he is due by law," said Epstein. A Philadelphia lawyer specializing in church tax law, Epstein is the producer of a video for pastors called "How To Maximize Your Clergy Salary and Benefits Package."
At one time Long also received a salary from New Birth. A church spokesman said Long no longer takes a salary, but instead accepts "love offerings" made by church members. Long would not discuss his current compensation.
Land donation
The charity took out a $1,160,000 mortgage to purchase the home in March 1998, according to DeKalb County property records. The mortgage was paid off by 2003, records show.
In October 2002, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries notified the IRS that the charity was dissolving and pledged to transfer all of its assets to New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.
The house was never transferred.
Instead, a year later, Long signed papers relinquishing the charity's interest in the home, making himself the sole owner. The same day, Christmas Eve 2003, Long took out a $300,000 loan using the house as collateral.
State law in New York requires that a nonprofit religious corporation must get court approval and notify the New York attorney general's office of its intent to transfer real estate to one of its officers. The attorney general's office said it could not find any record of the transaction or of Long's charity getting court approval.
Epstein said Long earned much of the charity's revenue through royalties, honorariums and gifts from other pastors and churches. He and Long emphasized that none of the charity's money came through soliciting New Birth members.
"I have great integrity with my congregation," Long said. "I would never take their money and use them to build my own personal happiness."
Tax and property records show, however, that New Birth accounted for more than half the charity's income in 1997. Fulton County property records show the church gave Long's charity 13.7 acres of land that year. The charity later reported selling the property for $1.4 million.
Also, a single donor accounted for 90 percent of the charity's income in 1999 and 2000, tax records show. One donor gave $1.9 million in 1999 and one donor gave $1.6 million the following year. As allowed by law, the records do not identify the donors.
Long would not say whether New Birth was the donor nor talk about the church's decision to donate land to his charity.
'Last say-so'
Long said a church board oversaw his charity's decisions to compensate him.
"It's not like I wake up and say, 'I think I want a Bentley,' " he said.
In the past, however, Long has claimed he was the final decision-maker at New Birth. In a 1999 interview, he told the Journal-Constitution how he became the unquestioned leader at his church. After presiding over New Birth's explosive growth, he said he told his congregation that a biblical leader shouldn't have to answer to a board. Long said the board relinquished its authority over him with his congregation's approval.
In his book "Taking Over," Long described the event in more detail. He wrote that after seven years at New Birth, he was frustrated by its deacon board because it was "gripping the purse strings" of the church and "telling the man of God when to jump and how high." He said he received a revelation from God, who encouraged him to get rid of the "ungodly governmental structure" at New Birth.
"That was the day I became pastor," Long wrote. "Up until that time, I was the hired preacher . ... "
Some pastors take advantage of a lack of denominational accountability to enrich themselves, said J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, a national magazine that covers charismatic churches. Grady said, however, that he didn't know enough about Long's ministry to comment on it specifically.
"There are many independent churches out there today that are accountable to no one," he said. "Their board structures are controlled by a few insiders and no one can bring correction. That is not healthy. But it will not change as long as the congregations don't demand change."
Several New Birth members said they approved of Long's compensation, home and leadership style. They said church boards often limit the vision of pastors.
"I know he's going to do the right thing," said Melvin Johnson, a member of the church's elder council. "He's going to sow the seed where it's supposed to be sowed."
Johnson said there was no New Birth board or committee that can overrule Long's decisions. "He would have the last say-so in terms of what ultimate decisions are made," said Johnson, a member for 17 years.
Everett Blakes, another member, said Long recently pledged to pay off the debts of 10 families and to buy a car for every unmarried mother at the church.
Blakes said it was New Birth's duty to support Long financially.
"We have to come bearing gifts," Blakes said. "When you come before the priest and he gives a word to you, then it's your duty to meet the needs of the priest."
'Jesus wasn't poor'
Several nonprofit experts and watchdog group leaders questioned how the $1.4 million home and the Bentley contributed to the charity's stated purpose.
They cited IRS rules warning that a nonprofit religious group could lose its tax-exempt status if it provides excess economic benefits to an insider.
"An organization can be a tax-exempt entity or a for-profit entity, but not both," said Rod Pitzer, a tax expert with Wall Watchers, a North Carolina-based watchdog group that monitors the finances of large Christian organizations.
Nonprofit experts and others who viewed the charity's records at the Journal-Constitution's request said that it did not appear to have an independent board.
"With a wife approving her husband's salary, it appears that this board's stamp is really just a rubber stamp," said Grassley, the Iowa senator.
Board members other than Long did not comment for this article. Long's wife, Vanessa, declined to comment and Thornton did not return telephone calls. A fourth board member who served for several years could not be located.
Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, said Long shouldn't build his prosperity on the back of a nonprofit religious corporation.
"It's wrong to use tax-subsidized dollars to support luxury goods for nonprofit executives," said Borochoff. "If he wants these things, then he should get people to give him money outside of a nonprofit organization."
Long said he represented a "paradigm shift" in the black church. He said he won't be like other pastors who died broke while giving everything to congregations that "wanted them to live in poverty and preach to them about prosperity."
Any problem people may have with his charity, Long said, was rooted in some people's expectations that pastors should be poor.
"I would love to sit with you and walk with you through the Bible to show that Jesus wasn't poor," he said.
His congregation is inspired by seeing its pastor do well, Long said.
"I'm not going to apologize for anything. ... "
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, popular with the poor at home, has offered to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of petrol.
Full Monty; is either one of the cruelest disinformation bomblets of all time, or, the genuine article showing us how this brother Works. Is it any wonder he's got old devils talking out the side of their necks on teevee? Next thing you know, they'll be calling him the anti-Christ.
"We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States," the populist leader said at the end of a visit to Communist-run Cuba on Tuesday.
Chavez did not say how Venezuela would go about providing petrol to poor communities.
Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA owns Citgo, which has 14,000 petrol stations in the United States.
The offer may sound attractive to Americans feeling pinched by soaring prices at the pump but not to the US government, which sees Chavez as a left-wing troublemaker in Latin America.
Petrol is cheaper than mineral water in oil-producing Venezuela, where consumers can fill their tanks for less than $2.
Average petrol prices have risen to $2.61 a gallon in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Free health care
Chavez and Castro (R) offered to train US doctors free of charge
Chavez said Venezuela could supply petrol to Americans at half the price they now pay if intermediaries who "speculated ... and exploited consumers" were cut out.
Venezuela supplies Cuba with generously financed oil, and plans to help Caribbean nations foot their oil bills.
Chavez, in Cuba to attend the graduation of Cuban-trained doctors from 28 countries, was seen off at the airport by Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Washington has accused the two leaders of being a destabilising influence in South America.
Chavez and Castro offered to give poor Americans free health care and train doctors free of charge.
What philosophical and practical positions would black conservatives embrace/espouse if their prescriptions were the same as those used by white conservatives?
In other words, are black conservatives asking black folk to do something that white conservatives do not do, would not do, have never done?
Economics, politics, social, military. What are black conservatives saying preaching that is/is not practiced by their sponsors? Does the rhetoric match the reality??
this is a post that, for many of you, has already awakened your senses to Wynton Marsalis and Rev. Jeremiah Wright laying it down about "Premature Autopsies." this piece, written by Stanley Crouch, became an integral part of my disciplined academic growth while at the university of michigan...and i have been thinking a great deal about one of the lines that always stuck with me.
"These are the ones who follow in the footsteps of the gifted and the disciplined who have been deeply hurt but not discouraged, who have been frightened but have not forgotten how to be brave, who revel in the company of their friends and sweethearts but are willing to face the loneliness that is demanded of mastery."
mastery demands a serious willingness to walk alone...and for me, this is an ongoing process/challenge of engaging and disengaging for a purpose - because one cannot apply mastery if the cost is forgetting the rest of this brilliant description.
The On Our Shoulders program was created out of the empathy felt by its founder, Ray Cook, as he watched countless youths die and become victims of violence on the streets of Baltimore.
The counseling, education and skills training offered by On Our Shoulders helps young people develop career potential and connections to advanced education.
The program components include:
Group Sessions
* Assessment
* Review Street Violence Statistics
* Health and Hygiene Classes Conducted by Registered Nurses
* Individual Drug Counseling and Referral
* Young Mothers/Fathers Group
* Support Groups for Young Victims of Violence
On The Job Training
* Pre-apprenticeship Training
* Catering, Food Handling and Baking Classes
* Clerical Training
* Construction/Electrical/Plumbing
* Barbering/Braiding (Hygiene Enhancement Classes)
* Modeling Training/Fashion Shows
Skill Enhancements
* Academic Skills
* G.E.D. Preparation and Testing
* Computer Skills
* Job Readiness Skills
* Life Skills/Coping Skills/Decision Making Skills
* Paid Internships
* College Preparation/Scholarships/Advanced Education
Crimminal Assessment
* Help young people understand charge papers and court procedures
* Provide an assessment on program participants to the courts
* Appropriately recommend "On Our Shoulders" as an alternative to incarceration
Advanced education will be based on academic performance, attendance, punctuality, and commitment to the program. Our youth will need to demonstrate a high degree of motivation within the program to receive a court representation and assessment verification.
On Our Shoulders
2846 West Lafayette Street - Baltimore, Maryland 21216
Phone: 410.947.3700 - Fax: 410.947.3200
onourshoulders@verizon.net
i am writing this post in recognition of the excellent questions posed by ebrown to republicans/conservatives with respect to "race" and "electoral politics." while my extended entry below was occasioned by the lashawn barber post, it was off the topic of eb's post - though relevant to the broader issue of republicans making a new appeal to american africans.
to the point, republicans may not be able to make inroads with the black community until black conservatives adopt a door-to-door strategy similar to that used by white conservatives...in addition, references to booker t washington are functionally useless in many respects (though not all) because black conservatives are not fiscally and institutionally capable of doling out patronage, let alone building a machine...while machine politics are still effective, black conservatives are notable for their fiscal dependency upon white-owned institutions...while the same may be said of so-called black liberals, this is not entirely true of segments of the black community where incomes are augmented through a variety of means not always captured by economists...recent investments in real estate in harlem followed, rather than preceded, corporate decisions to locate in harlem based on new, comprehensive measures of disposal income and spending patterns...beyond the simple notion of "buying power" is the question of what will folks buy for a premium, frequently, and without reservation...a walk along 125th street provides some interesting answers - and much of the commercial activity is directed toward street-vendor entrepreneurs unable or unwilling to pay store rents on a premium strip like 125th street, but they still get their piece of the action. today, a number of recognizable national brands have their best-selling stores in harlem...
it may be that there are a considerable number of black folks who simply will not respect the position of black republicans because of the role of white funding...can you represent one group if your bills are paid by another - especially if many policy/ideology issues remain unbridged? i think this same principle applied to Garvey's criticism of DuBois and to Malcolm X's criticism of King...of course, DuBois was never a "popular" leader - and even given King's popularity, he saw the limitations that funding sources imposed on the CRM...black republicans do not have the intellectual reserves of Dubois or the magnetism/leadership of King - and therefore must change tactics to make inroads.
the social conservatism of american africans is not unlike that of caribbean or continental africans...each group has an extensive legacy of seeking to preserve core values like family, industry, achievement and reciprocity...to the extent that republicans can get in the door by demonstrating industry (not charity from white donors), achievement (not hype from pseudo-objective media entities) and reciprocity (not hollow "do for self" mantras, but grounded economic development/investment commitments (real $-wagon train charter equity), i believe they will make considerable inroads in any community...at present the image of republicans is too tied to images that black folks believe are antithetical to our well-being...black republicans, not unlike black democrats, face the challenge of wresting some of the imagery and apparatus away from their fellow party members who would proffer a narrow vision of the future.
i think there is a good deal of merit in the principles of the republicans, but linkages
some things from the conservative side that may be relevant...
i don't regularly read LaShawn Barber's column...a few of the pieces i have read were lacking in many respects - so my interest waned. nonetheless, i believe there is considerable value in her line of thinking...check out this link...http://www.southernevents.org/southerners_first.htm
it seems that given some of the unanticipated outcomes of the civil rights movement, the non-black financial leadership of the movement, the limitations of american schools (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm) and the constitutional questions surrounding Brown (let alone the implicit assumption that black folk need white folk to feel worthy), there are some issues worth delving into here...
in the absence of integrating schools - an area untouched by the founders - how could the US have addressed the issues at hand in the jim crow south...it seems to me that one of the most pivotal moments in our history was the compromise of 1877 which removed union troops from the south...it also seems to me that the failure of southern states to provide security/protection (physical-political-economic) to blacks was of greater import than the opportunity to attend integrated schools...that's fairly obvious...
and so, the question for me is what are the implications of states rights in a federalist system when states fail to uphold the principal agreement of citizenship - the exchange of allegiance for protection...is there a federal prerogative to impose the laws of that state...it seems that this approach would have been much more controversial - more difficult to implement - but could likely have resulted in a much better solution that what prevails now...
establishing state-supported protections for blacks, even two generations after the national lynching frenzy, would have gone a long way to obviating the need for Brown legislation...take the case of the Blair Bill - also centered on education...the bill proposed funding based on population - with the proviso that schools with black children in the south would receive equitable allotments - based on population...imagine the implications in 1883 for South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.
it seems that the federal government's agreement of 1877 (Hayes, Ohio Republican - Tilden, NY Democrat) sealed the deal in which southern states were relieved of their obligation to honor its citizens...the removal of union troops ushered in the era of the klan - (nathan b. forrest-gump) - in this light, the education of children in integrated schools seems a farcical approach to such a fundamental security issue.
barber has some ammo here, but i don't see the point in solely attacking the democrats when it was the republican party under hayes which really created the circumstances that required the level of social engineering that is decried on her blog...of course, it can be argued that these parties are like all institutions in that they seek merely to extend their existence through whatever means available...and that makes the democrats and republicans more alike than most care to admit.
Rather than just telling us to feel good, dopamine tells us what's salient--the unexpected bits of new information we need to pay attention to in order to survive, like alerts about sex, food and pleasure, as well as danger and pain. If you are hungry and you get a whiff of a bacon cheeseburger...Dopamine's role is to shout: "Hey! Pay attention to this!" Only as an afterthought might it whisper "Wow, this feels great." So maybe addicts aren't just chasing a good time. Perhaps their brains have somehow mistakenly learned that drugs are the most important thing to pay attention to, as crucial to survival as food or sex.
Methinkst the question actually begged by the Director of NIDA is why don't these people pay closer attention to the marketing and propaganda flow which is, after all, the lifeblood of hegemonic governance of the free.