Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (10259)	1/29/2006 3:13:27 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541761

I truly wish there was a group of people writing books/articles who: 1) Were not hating Bush before he even took office and 2) Actually had access to documents that are important, but the classified parts taken out, that could give us an up to date view of what has happened, and how the situation could be improved. Karen, the book I recommended is good stuff. You will certainly disagree with it. But it engages the issue and offers, if you dig around in the literature, a multiplicity of policy alternatives. As for "hating Bush", these books/articles/op eds are not about "hating Bush" but about the mistakes in his policies, deeply serious ones, and what could have been differently and what, even now, can be done differently. As for access to documents, these are folk who have access to all the documents we need to debate these matters publicly. When one of the reviewers mentioned Clarke as an authority on which he based anything, I shut down on his review. That's a shame because Richard Clarke is one of the premier authorities here. He knows more about the insides of policy debates, about the intelligence, and has some interesting proposals, some of which strike me as wrong headed. And surely you know, no one was more vigorously critical of various elements of the Clinton administration's policies in this area than Clarke when he was in the administration. Folk simply grew unwilling to deal with him. It's in his own book, in the first book by the two authors I recommended, in the Washington Post editor's book on bin Laden which Tom Kean recommends, and various other places. And by that, I mean knowledgeable in real 'boots on the ground' knowledge, not in a publishing empire, nor in Universities, unless they had actually lived in the areas being discussed for several years. The problem with this criteria, Karen, is that it eliminates almost all the upper level policy makers in the Bush administration. Almost all the civilian ranks at the Pentagon, almost all the folk the Pentagon placed in Iraq to run the occupation (Larry Diamond's book is particularly good on this score), and past and present members of the NSC.