Politicians Speaking Publicly Versus Privately

What if a co-worker told you both of the following things:  A) She was leaving the company to take a new job; and B) She was not leaving the company to take a new job.

You would probably assume that she was playing a joke on you or that she was struggling with an illness that affected her memory.  Or maybe that you caught her in a lie.

But these sorts of contradictory statements are now the norm in American politics.

See the following:

Yesterday, Condoleezza Rice stated the following in Iraq:  “I don’t know who the prime minister is going to be, and it’s not our role to try and determine who the prime minister is going to be.” 

Then again, it seems like we are trying to determine who the prime minister should be: 

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on an unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital amid a months-long political crisis, publicly questioned the leadership of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, the strongest indication yet that the United States wants him out of contention as head of Iraq’s permanent government. 

Such American interference in Iraqi politics is also corroborated by this recent statement by the Iraqi prime minister:

Facing growing pressure from the Bush administration to step down, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq vigorously asserted his right to stay in office on Wednesday and warned the Americans against interfering in the country’s political process. 

Perhaps there’s no lesson here, only frustration that our …

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Modern Heroes and Modern Politicians

When did careful planning and execution become un-cool in real life? Probably about the same time it became un-cool in Hollywood. 

Think how the American hero has evolved. He used to be smart, principled and disciplined.  Not anymore.  Where we used to have student-of-the-game Ted Williams, we now have Barry Bonds.  Where we used to have Atticus Finch, Rick Blaine and Jefferson Smith we have hot-headed Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise).  Planners and careful executers include heroes as diverse as Rocky Bilboa and Gandhi.  Heroes-who-plan include soldiers from starkly different backgrounds, such as the soldiers in The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. 

Modern television and movies don’t offer heroes who intelligently plan and collaborate with others to save the day.  A television show offering this in the 60’s was Mission Impossible.  The Impossible Mission Force was a group of specialists who actually sat down to plan their mission at the beginning of each show. 

Modern heroes rarely sit down to plan their missions.  They bristle at the thought of collaborating.  Modern protagonists are reactive, not planners. Think of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Terminator II.  These are individualistic hot headed rejecters of collaboration.  When they succeed in the end it is because they got lucky at that last desperate moment, not because they pondered contingencies before setting out.   Interestingly, if you want planning and execution, look to Hollywood’s villains, people such as Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader or Batman’s Joker.

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Sunk Costs and Iraq

Three years ago, my 96-year-old grandfather was dying and he was upset.  But he wasn’t upset about dying. He approached his own death with great inner strength.  What made him upset was that his government had needlessly invaded Iraq.  Because Iraq was not a threat, he said, we were squandering precious resources better used at home. The Iraq invasion was an alien idea to my grandfather’s conservative values.  Until his death in May of 2004, he lamented that the invasion would result in an intractable mess with no palatable solution. 
 
His assessment has proven correct.  Every day, we are paying 200 million more dollars to prolong this bloody occupation. That’s $100,000 per minute.  That’s a lot of money.  St. Louis baseball fans who revel at the near completion of the new stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals might appreciate that this war effort is the financial equivalent of buying a new major league baseball stadium every two days.  The cost of the Iraq war so far could have paid for 32 million children to attend a year of Head Start.

The $350 billion we will have spent on this war (by the end of 2006) amounts to more than $3,500 for each American household.  There is also a more precious resource to consider; the occupation is killing more than sixty American soldiers every month, almost 2,400 troops killed to date. This is the equivalent of crashing a packed airliner every other month. Nor must we forget that this …

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Carefully Counting the Dead

Let’s see . . .  We attacked Iraq because “they killed 3,000 Americans.”  Besides being racist (it assumes that all people from the Middle East are the same, when we’ve always known that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks), this war cry has proven to be a grossly irrational wasting of lives and national resources.

We’ve now killed more than 30,000 Iraq civilians to “right” this wrong of 9/11.   And we’ve spent $300 billion to get the job done. And we’ve proudly employed torture.  And we lie that we are trying to establish “democracies” when we are actually trying to empower thugs who will be friendly to U.S. business interests–witness the Palestinian elections and our constant meddling in Iraqi politics.  In the process of waging this war in Iraq, we are enraging millions of middle-eastern people who are making the destruction of America their lives’ work.

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