SPONSORED BY:

‘That Was Amateur Night’

 

Email To A Friend

Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.

Separate multiple addresses with commas

SPONSORED BY
 

One hears about " the militarization of American foreign policy. " Is there truth to that?
The problem is, the nonmilitary institutions—especially the Agency for International Development—have been gutted over the past 15 years. When I left government, AID had about 15,000 employees, and it was an expeditionary agency. People that worked for AID expected to be deployed into developing countries, and they had all the requisite skills to do reconstruction and help with governance and building rule of law and agriculture and all the rest. AID today has less than 3,000 people. It's essentially a contracting agency that outsources the entire thing … As for the State Department: we have more people in military bands than we have Foreign Service officers. So the civilian institutions that, during the cold war, had the lead in carrying out those foreign-policy functions need to be re-created and dramatically strengthened. Until they are, the military will probably end up carrying most of the burden.

Is the machinery of government set up to cope with the challenges we face?
No, I think it all needs to be changed. We need to rethink the 1947 National Security Act, which laid out our present national-security structure. The national-security institutions that we have today were essentially created to fight the cold war, and they reflect lessons we learned in World War II. So the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the National Security Council all came out of the National Security Act of 1947. It seems to me that there needs to be a new National Security Act that looks at the kind of complicated world I've described and says: how would we write a new National Security Act to update the institutions and the framework?

But the problem is more than structure. We need to think about how to do these things in a completely new way. I don't think making AID bigger once more is the solution, any more than I think re-creating the old United States Information Agency is the answer to our strategic communications problems. To rethink USIA, we need to bring in some 23-year-olds—maybe the guys from Google, and those putting out news over the Internet—and ask them: If you want to reach the rest of the world with a message, as actually we do, how would you do it? How would you structure it? And is there a way to partner what happens in the private sector with the public sector? That needs to be our approach to development and all these things we are trying to do on the "soft" side, the civilian side of U.S. security policy

… Look, Texas A&M [where Gates was president before returning to government] has had teams in Tikrit [in Iraq] and in Afghanistan for the last five years. They are all from the agricultural and the veterinary side. And these guys go into the scariest parts of those countries, and they don't care: that's what they do. We've done that sort of work with farmers in America since the 1860s. Now they're doing it internationally—and going into amazing places. And A&M is not alone in this.

An ambitious agenda.
Yes, and one of the many obstacles to reform is that, at the top of government, the urgent always tends to crowd out the important. And that tension has gotten worse now, I think, because of the complexity of the world we face. I recall Henry Kissinger in 1970. There had been the Syrian invasion of Jordan. I think something was going on in Lebanon. And we had discovered the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba. I always thought Kissinger managing two or three crises at the same time was an act of legerdemain. I tell you: that was amateur night compared to the world today.

© 2008

Discuss

Sponsored by

Member Comments

  • Posted By: Krohn @ 11/02/2008 11:10:39 PM

    The Wall Street crisis was planned the night of Obama's meeting at Bill Ayres home to put Obama in The White House. Together they put a beautiful plan into place.

    This Strategy was first elucidated in the 1966 issue of 'The Nation' Magazine by a pair of radical Socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

    David Horowitz summarizes it as:

    "The strategy of forcing political change through an orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of Capitalism by overloading the Government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
    unquote

    Obama begin with ACORN by funneling millions into their organization. He then trained ACORN to stage protests in banks to force them to issue risky loans or they would be threatened to face racial charges. ACORN was trained to intimidate financial institutions into giving ???Ninja??? loans to people with NO assets, NO job and NO income, who couldn???t afford these loans.

    That caused the housing bubble two years ago it was by ACORN's actions they were able to destroy our credit system.

    As this played out, D-Barney Frank and D-Chris Dodd were able to cover up the millions of improvident loans to these bad risky house buyers. And Barney Frank and his chums successfully were able to block all of President Bush's attempts to put a rein on this problem.

    So Fannie & Freddie was forced to purchase all these failed subprime mortgages.

    Then both Frank and Dodd denied that there were any problems, and refused the Bush Admin. requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the 'minute they failed'.

    Democrats then blamed Bush saying it happened on his watch knowing it would hurt the Republican Party in the election setting it up that Barack Obama could use this to his advantage.

    Karl Marx once compared a Revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

    Barack Obama is that Marxist mole !

  • Posted By: Concerned Canadian @ 11/01/2008 5:18:46 PM

    WELL SAID BILL COSBY !!

    'They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
    I can't even talk the way these people talk:
    Why you ain't,
    Where you is,
    What he drive,
    Where he stay,
    Where he work,
    Who you be...

    And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.

    And then I heard the father talk.

    Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads.
    You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

    In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

    People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now
    We've got these knuckleheads walking around.

    The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.

    These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.

    $500 sneakers for what?

    And they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

    I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.

    Where were you when he was 2?

    Where were you when he was 12?

    Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?

    And where is the father? Or who is his father?

    People putting their clothes on backward:
    Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong?

    People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?

    Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?

    What part of Africa did this come from??

    We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa ...

    I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.

    I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don't have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany , Scotland , England , Ireland , or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already! ! !

    With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap .....And all of them are in jail.

    Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

    We have got to take the neighborhood back.

    People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now.

    We have millionaire football players who cannot read.

    We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.

    Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.

    We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.

    " We cannot blame the white people any longer."
    Dr. William Henry 'Bill' Cosby, Jr., Ed.D.

  • Posted By: Concerned Canadian @ 11/01/2008 2:00:24 PM

    Two central issues in the election Barack Obama is wrong and misleading:

    1) No tax increases to those earning $250,000 or less promised by Obama, then he
    lowered this figure to $200,000, then the "Gift that keeps on Giving" Joe Biden says
    the number is $150,000 and just yesterday Gov. Bill Richardson says the figure is
    $120,000 ...and now a videotape is disclosed where it shows Obama recently stated
    that in the interest of fairness with taxes is around $80,000.00!!
    Sounds like good old fashion Democratic ???reverse auction ???tax policy they implement
    after they break their campaign promise to the American people.

    2) On national security ...Obama???s own VP running mate Joe Biden ... ???mark my words,
    this guy Obama is going to be tested by a generated international crisis within 6
    months of his Presidency..I guarantee it??? Obama will meet with USA's enemies with
    no pre-conditions!
    John McCain???s surge strategy in Iraq is working and its saving the lives of young
    American men and women in uniform serving there...Obama won't admit to this day
    the surge is working and he voted to cut funding for these military forces !!

    John McCain is Commander-In-Chief material ....Obama is just a cardboard "cut-out"
    candidate of the DNC.

Reply

Report Abuse

Enter comments if any for reporting abuse

Newsweek on Digg