Home sick, blowing nose, changing diaper, I’ve been looking a lot at one screen or another and listening to speakers. Watched West Wing last night. Read this about Rumsfeld and a memo with questions about the war on terror today. [Today is important because CNN said this afternoon that it is actually the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the war on terror – I think it being the anniversary of the bombing in Lebanon.] So, unaware of the duration myself, it is about time that some questioning like this is taking place:
“Are we winning or losing the global war on terror?” That’s the key question that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asks in an uncharacteristically gloomy memo he recently sent to his closest Pentagon advisers. And the answer, it seems, is far from clear. In the memo, which appeared in yesterday’s (22 October) issue of “USA Today,” Rumsfeld asks top aides like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz –- who is seen as a chief architect of the Iraq policy — to think of new ways to fight the war on terror. He says Washington will eventually win its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that it will be a “long, hard slog.” But Rumsfeld also appears to suggest — for the first time – that the United States may be fighting its war on terrorism in the wrong way, by focusing too much on military operations and not enough on diplomatic efforts and other forms of pressure. He also wonders if the Pentagon can be reshaped fast enough to meet the terrorist threat. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Rumsfeld appears to have had an “epiphany,” adding that while Rumsfeld may not yet have shifted policy, the memo is “the first bit of introspection that I’ve even whiffed coming out of the Defense Department.”
You would want to think that these are questions being asked before during and after any big decisions made by government. Usually they are, usually most decsions are made in good faith with best information…but why is so difficult seeing it to be done that way in public? Is that why West Wing is so popular in that it provides a comforting template for layering on the news of the day? Sort of the other end of the humanization of the decision process as that Tim Horton’s commercial as the Canadian navy in the Gulf getting its double-double. We want to know humans are involved.
Another intersting thing is the source of my quotation, Radio Free Europe, one of the few real US state / state-ish news agencies, set up to fight the commies with a form of the truth via shortwave transmissions, now hanging on being just a moderate reliable news source so Swiss and Finns who speak English will know.