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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Lacelle who wrote (9906)	5/26/1999 10:35:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Democrats always get accused of making "straw men" so that they can knock em down. My cynicism is non-partisan; I would accuse politicians of all stripes of resorting to this maneuver. However, he has shown to be made of stronger stuff than old Bubba. Unfortunately, it isn't a wrestling match between them. Wouldn't it be great if it was? Preferably in mud? It's important to bear in mind the process by which these decisions are made. When a situation like this emerges, nobody expects a leader to make his own decisions, based on his intimate personal knowledge of the region in questions. He gets a team together from State, Defense, and the CIA. Briefings are held. Lists of options are presented and potential risks & gains evaluated. A president has no choice but to trust these evaluations as presented by the experts. Evaluating Serbian military capacity is the job of military intelligence, not the President. If the Air Force tells him that they can disable the Serb military in 2 weeks of bombing, what can he do but trust them? The CIA presents evaluations of the Serbian political situation, what is he going to do, argue? Obviously, domestic politics are taken into consideration; they always are. Any war not involving a direct attack has to be "sold" to the populace by the government in power. Executive decisions are never any better than the information on which they are based. The bureaucrats know this, and have often manipulated executives by controlling the information available to them. It's like a computer: shit in, shit out. It is convenient to blame everything on one person, especially one so easy to dislike, but the failure seems largely systemic to me. For one thing, I suspect that the old military habit of planning for the last war rather than the next one has reared its head again.