Bring on the Iraq micromanagers
Why Congress has every right to pull strings and show leadership in executing the war.
Rosa Brooks
LA Times
FACED WITH congressional bills setting timelines for the redeployment of combat troops from Iraq, the president and his dwindling band of supporters have been complaining bitterly about lawmakers' efforts to "micromanage" the war.
Funny, you'd think they'd be relieved! It's about time someone in the U.S. government showed an interest in managing — much less micromanaging — this war.
After all, the Bush administration's lack of interest in war-related details is legendary. Before the war began, the administration manifested this by ignoring intelligence that undermined its case for war. In his 2003 State of the Union address, for instance, Bush told the nation that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Those infamous 16 words were justified by the existence of documents purporting to show a uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. Not, we presume, wishing to micromanage the decision-making process, Bush and his top advisors ignored evidence that the documents were fake — even though, as the Washington Post concluded this week, the documents were "filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search."
And then there was the prewar "planning," a similar triumph of non-micromanagement on the part of the administration. Donald H. Rumsfeld, another high-concept guy, didn't like being told that he was sending too few troops to do the job in Iraq, so he forced out Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who'd made the mistake of suggesting that a little attention to such details might not be amiss.
Then, when the obsessive-compulsive types involved in the State Department's massive Future of Iraq project tried to interest the Pentagon in their postwar planning recommendations, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon war planners made it clear they didn't want to hear about it. The result? About 2,500 pages of painstakingly detailed recommendations on subjects ranging from rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure to democratic reform went straight into the circular file.
(Continued here.)
Rosa Brooks
LA Times
FACED WITH congressional bills setting timelines for the redeployment of combat troops from Iraq, the president and his dwindling band of supporters have been complaining bitterly about lawmakers' efforts to "micromanage" the war.
Funny, you'd think they'd be relieved! It's about time someone in the U.S. government showed an interest in managing — much less micromanaging — this war.
After all, the Bush administration's lack of interest in war-related details is legendary. Before the war began, the administration manifested this by ignoring intelligence that undermined its case for war. In his 2003 State of the Union address, for instance, Bush told the nation that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Those infamous 16 words were justified by the existence of documents purporting to show a uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. Not, we presume, wishing to micromanage the decision-making process, Bush and his top advisors ignored evidence that the documents were fake — even though, as the Washington Post concluded this week, the documents were "filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search."
And then there was the prewar "planning," a similar triumph of non-micromanagement on the part of the administration. Donald H. Rumsfeld, another high-concept guy, didn't like being told that he was sending too few troops to do the job in Iraq, so he forced out Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who'd made the mistake of suggesting that a little attention to such details might not be amiss.
Then, when the obsessive-compulsive types involved in the State Department's massive Future of Iraq project tried to interest the Pentagon in their postwar planning recommendations, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon war planners made it clear they didn't want to hear about it. The result? About 2,500 pages of painstakingly detailed recommendations on subjects ranging from rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure to democratic reform went straight into the circular file.
(Continued here.)
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