Skip to main content

Another nail in

History is still in the process of deciding on "W" Bush's legacy, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates put another nail in the coffin of Bush's foreign policy legacy. Speaking at West Point recently, he said:

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to
again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa
should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put
it."

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and Bush charged the U.S. into two such wars simultaneously. And when Rumsfeld left his post, VP Dick Cheney hailed Rumsfeld as the greatest Secretary of Defense in American history. Hmmm.

Gates is the one who belongs in a short-list of the greatest appointed public servants of our time. Appointed by Bush to save his administration's defense strategy, he stayed on with Obama to attempt to bring our nation's defense situation back from the brink. That is a tough job which he has navigated well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2020 Vote: Bending toward justice

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  --  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My hero, Dr. King, was wrong about justice. I love Dr. King. His writings and speeches are collected in a book called “A Testament of Hope”. That book was a revelation for me. Dr. King had a moral clarity that is rare in this world. Many of his observations were accurate, wise, and timeless. But the ‘arc of the moral universe’ statement is misleading. We are promised no such experience in this world. In Dr. King’s time, the quote may have been both accurate and wise. King saw the expanding reach of national newspapers and television networks. When the nation, through that new media, was exposed to the reality and brutality of overt Southern racism--then the nation, which believed it shared a common and decent morality, imposed that morality on the South. While Dr. King’s understanding may have been both accurate and wise, it was not timeless. This is where my moral hero comes u...
Post a Comment
Read more

Deferred Maintenance

I once worked at a public university that had a huge 'deferred maintenance' problem. Their major equipment was often 35 years old with an expected lifetime of 30 years. As a result, they were constantly doing repairs and paying overtime, but had little time to do preventive maintenance and little money to make pro-active investments in new equipment. In one dorm, water from bad showers on the upper floors started leaking into the main lobby, and the 'fix' was to drag out garbage cans to catch the water. I was told that repairing the plumbing itself was expensive so it was being figured into the "five-year budget plan." The garbage can fix went on for at least a year. A two-page spread in The Atlantic Monthly (March 2008, p 38-39) calls out our nation's growing infrastructure problem. This is a real 'tragedy of the commons' situation: individuals are not willing to give up more tax money if they don't see a real-time, personal benefit. At the sa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whose fault are high gas prices?

GM recently announced the closing of several auto plants in North America, primarily those that make large, gas inefficient vehicles. The news anchor began the segment with "Due to high gas prices..." Since everyone's blaming high gas prices for our woes these days, it begs the question "Whose fault are high gas prices?" Your driveway is the first place to look for answers. If your car gets bad mileage, that's probably your fault. Some luck, huh? After that, I blame "the invisible hand." This is the idea that when everyone follows their own self-interest in a free market, everyone ends up better off. Everyone is motivated to work hard and be efficient and produce goods that others want to trade for. Free markets do a fine job of producing wealth and prosperity, but they've really botched the energy situation. For all it's glory, the invisible hand has little strategic foresight. In the 1970s, we learned that America was vulnerable to high e...
Post a Comment
Read more