09-12-2007, 07:07 PM
|
#2939
|
|
Moderasaurus Rex
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 33,084
|
- What’s most striking, Bard says, is how his students in his counterinsurgency and terrorism classes at Washington’s National War College, freshly returned from Iraq, testified to the paucity of strategic thinking on the ground.
“This was a Special Forces colonel, a really sharp guy, he’s a guy who knew all this stuff on counterinsurgency. He said to me, ‘Let me give you a specific example: I’m on the tarmac at an airbase in Iraq, and up walks [then Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz. He says, “How’s everything going, Colonel?” And I say, “This is a pretty tenacious insurgency, Mr. Wolfowitz.” And Wolfowitz looks back and says, “This is not an insurgency.”’”
At which point, Mr. O’Neill relates, his student “rolled his eyes, and said, ‘What can you say to someone like that?’”
link
__________________
“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
|
|
|
