Additional detail: The author was one of the architects for major pieces of the Iraq war, including the surge.
> She was an assistant to Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority. She was Senior Director for Iraq at the United States National Security Council.
Around that time, Bremer decided to bar former ba'ath officer from either serving the new military or getting pension. That decision almost single-handedly created the backbone of the terrorist networks that would become ISIS.
People from that admin should be shunned from any published analysis but failing that, I am happy that forums like this allows us to augment their biographies.
On the other hand, I have yet to see a Bloomberg article not about finance that was not misinformed. Those about tech especially are pretty bad, and every time I dug a bit around their geopolitical analysis, I was pretty underwhelmed.
Interestingly, it was GWB that also put a lot of effort into pandemic preparedness. See: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi...
History is kind of a weird place.
Sure he may have done some things that are good, but he made many horrible decisions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_f...
How did Bush get a fifth year from a four year presidency?
Why is this complicated and where did the number 5 even come from?
I think this is splitting hairs over who gets credit. Remember that Congress needed to raise the money and the taxpayers needed to pay it.
From a practical standpoint, usually some credit is given for leadship to the one who gets a program off the ground. It seems fair in this case that GWB gets credit for that. You can also look at later people over a longer span of time and give them credit/blame for maintaining and administering it, as well (or letting it stagnate, like his pandemic plan, unfortunately).
The main point here is that the GWB presidency was not black and white. I think he was a good person and made many good decisions and one really bad one. Quite possibly, with a different VP, he would be a lauded and dignified president, and a lot of things would be different.
Or, if his pandemic plan had been maintained, and bore fruit today (that is showed benefits in fighting coronavirus), it may have redeemed his presidency entirely.
But consider at the time, the United States had just suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack, the conventional wisdom (and much intelligence) was that Iraq held chemical weapons and finally the United States was engaging the Iraqi military on a regular basis as the sole enforcer of the UN sanctioned no fly zone. I won’t argue that the Iraq War wasn’t a mistake. It was, but it was made in good faith and largely, I think, out of fear.
He was a warmonger. His aides and his vice president stood to make tons of money out of that war.
The GWB admin still had the level of competence to organize something like the last Iraq war so it made sense it could have pandemic preparedness which is orders of magnitudes easier.
I don't think the US public really realize how incompetent and dumb the current administration looks from abroad.
This isn't true. The Ba'ath party had already largely lost its Arab nationalist identity and become progressively more and more Islamist after the first Gulf War.
Saddam announced the "return to faith" campaign[0] in 1993 (which he publicly hinted at by writing Allahuakbar on the Iraqi flag in 1991) and by the time of the second 2003 invasion, Ba'ath party loyalists were already beheading suspected prostitutes in the streets.
What created the backbone of ISIS is a culmination of things - mostly around the collective, ongoing punishment of the Middle East. Arab nationalism was challenged in every direction by the West, country-based nationalism was challenged in every direction, and then the US put on a surprised pikachu face when the only thing left was religious identity.
That's not so much the point the parent comment was making, I believe. Mostly that by making sure the previous military and political leaders would not be allowed to play any role in the future and not get pensions, they'd obviously have zero incentive to work with the new regime/administration/whatever.
On the other hand, they had plenty of incentive to work against it, which they then did. They may have gone full Arab nationalist if that had been an option, but to be funded in the middle east in a war against the US and Shiite-aligned governments, you'll look to the Saudis, and that pretty much only leaves Wahabi fundamentalism as your rally-cry.
Picture that: your skill is to organize soldiers and military operations but the only local and legal employer refuses you and denies you any pension. Did they really think they would go beg in the streets rather than join the militias in dire need or organizational advices?
But O'Sullivan came to Iraq via the State Department, and Rumsfeld didn't want her there, which seems to indicate that perhaps she wasn't as insane as the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Cheany neo-con people.
In anycase, I think this article makes a good basic point: lots of countries are going to be in deep trouble with this oil price.
Yeah, I really needed a State Department analyst to tell me that.
The point of analysis pieces often isn't to share new information, but instead is to share that fact that information is now very important.
Also I for one didn't realise that most of Saudi support in Congress had eroded enough in favor of the US industry to the point where is was now (to quote) "a sharp increase in hostility from members of the U.S. Congress who in the past appeared to appreciate the multifaceted relationship between Riyadh and Washington"
Damn, checks all the boxes
It's akin to taking business advice from Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.
His failure was in ethics. THAT might be something you'd not want to look towards him for.
It's very useful to separate the two.
In this instance, an expert's read on a situation is interesting and informative. You just might not want to take his policy recommendation.
> geopolitical disaster
"disasters" are profitable (for those able to benefit from corruption). And enable western/democratic governments to get away with violating their citizens. PATRIOT Act for instance. Read 1984 for background of how "fear of attack" and "security" is used to keep the masses in line.
This is fascinating :)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
The first casualty of war is the truth after all. Last I checked we've been in a neverending period of war.
Full disclouse: I knew him personally… mostly from a distance. It was disgusting seeing the likes of Senator John McCain try to capitalize on his death. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t the man depicted in Jon Krakauers’ book.
Pat Tillman was killed in friendly fire. But the story we got initially was that he was killed by the enemy.
"Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal approved the Silver Star citation on April 28, 2004, which gave a detailed account of Tillman's death including the phrase "in the line of devastating enemy fire," but the next day he sent a P4 confidential memo warning senior government members that Tillman might actually have been killed by friendly fire"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman#Surrounding_Tillma...
Certainly Tillman didn't spread the lies. Jessica Lynch didn't spread the lies either. It was the military/news/etc.
Hence : The first casualty of war is the truth.
> Full disclouse: I knew him personally… mostly from a distance.
Yeah, I knew him "personally" too like millions of other football fans.
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Less than a third of Harvard students come from a household with income greater than $100,000/year. Almost half the students come from households with income between $30,000 and $75,000/year. One in six students comes from a poor family.
Harvard is firmly middle class. The data simply doesn’t support the argument that Harvard admissions is some old money New England conspiracy.
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No. Only 25% of households in the US have annual income between $35,000 and $75,000. About one in five families in the US is below the poverty line. So middle class students are over represented at Harvard. Students from poor families are only slightly underrepresented, and considering that household income and academic achievement are correlated, it’s actually a testament to their efforts to have socially conscious admissions. The facts do not support your argument. On this you are simply wrong.
"The median family income for Harvard undergraduates is $168,800—more than three times the national median, according to a recent study."
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/25/harvard-income-...
There is the non-elite "meritocracy" and elite finishing school, side by side. Which are the suckers propping up the other? You tell me.
I’m curious to learn more about this. Do you have a good source for this data?
Why do you tell me to "keep in mind" essentially the very point I was making?
It is legal to influence the instituions themselves with money as they have ownership of all resources involved. The admissions scandal demonstrated the difference quite well. Of course the admission has other unspoken reasons for wanting them - contacts for tbeir network and their own pride and flatrery about "cultural worth". Stupid human social trick stuff of skewed priorties.
First, I have no idea how she got her scholarly titles when her writing is so incoherent, and devoid of line of though. Some times she outright descends into polsci technobabble, and I loose her. She is not a scholar, but a person who went to school and bullshited her way to the degree with every mean and way, in hope to get a cushy government job.
Second, for a portion of her writing making sense, her vision of reality is a laconic polsci101 recital, and carbon copy of her mentors views, without a iota of extra thought. The reality of politics is that shit happens, the reality of war is that you don't improve global stability by starting one. Her works state that it can be otherwise.
My criteria for a politician who knows his onions, is caution. Above all is caution, and an understanding that whatever he or she does returns threefold if made in error. Anybody claiming a clear, logical, rational picture of the world has never worked a day in job where his life depends on it.
I repeat my opinion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23051520
> People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.
Every big name "strategist" USA had since the WW2 I can name was a big joke, and such types will keep coming unless people will start calling things their real names. The "geopolitical technobabblers" should not allowed to sit in high posts.
In this case, I think there can't be a better way than to pull her early works, and her academic writing for everybody to see.
A third option, which I consider most likely, is that this piece is doing both. The author most likely believes in what they are saying and are trying to manipulate things in a certain direction. There is noting wrong with this, and I think understanding the bias is merely a more effective way to gain more from reading this.
Actually I meant the author was aware of his view and is being both manipulative while fairly forwarding his agenda. Your option would be a fourth possibility? Which would make sense since any two binary outcomes will give a 2x2 sample space for a total of 4 outcomes.
Same principle behind why double-blind tests have high efficacy.
Also, most geopolitical problems aren't simple analytical problems. There isn't a 'right answer' that one can divine by approaching the space with an emotionless evaluation.
Reading news articles or analyses is in effect a metastudy and doing it double blind is pointless - a metastudy requires an analysis of the provenance of the information in order to weigh the results from multiple sources.
A random bit of context with no obvious connection isn't much context. Context is more than a single given fact.