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CHAPTER 17 http://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/3668.pdf
CONCLUSION: LESSONS OF THE IRAQ WAR
In a way, it would be reassuring to believe that the mistakes the United States made in the Iraq War were the result of unintelligent leaders making poor decisions. If that were so, then the United States could be assured of avoiding similar mistakes in the future simply by selecting better, more intelligent leaders. However, this is not the case. The overwhelming majority of decisions in the Iraq War were made by highly intelligent, highly experienced leaders whose choices, often in consensus, seemed reasonable at the time they were made, but nonetheless added up over time to a failure to achieve our strategic objectives. Examining the reasoning behind these decisions and the systemic failures that produced them should be the first task in analyzing the Iraq War's lessons. What follow are examinations of some of those key decisions, and in some cases their unintended consequences, as well as their implications for future wars.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Chapter 26, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson - The Passage Of Power
Robert A. Caro, 2012
www.amazon.com/Passage-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0375713255/
Torrent Hash: 6a0fc3f515d43b07dc91f00efa5fc100d9de0d81
The bullets of Dallas had made John F. Kennedy a martyr — and the martyrdom of a leader lends new power to causes he had championed. Lyndon Johnson knew this. “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes,” he explained to Doris Goodwin. “John Kennedy had died. But his ‘cause’ was not really clear. That was my job. I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause.” He began to do that when, in that first address to Congress on November 27, he said he was trying to finish what Kennedy had started, “to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.” He couched his support of legislation in those terms. “No memorial … could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” During the transition he was constantly invoking the late President’s memory. And the invocations accomplished their purpose. JFK’s martyrdom had galvanized support for the causes with which he had identified himself in his eloquent speeches. “Kennedy’s assassination touched many people as they had not been touched before,” as an historian has written. “Could the murder of so young and promising a leader be redeemed? Must his life be wasted?” The passage of legislation he had introduced was a way of ensuring it wouldn’t be wasted. His death generated behind legislation that had seemed dead in congressional waters a tremendous new momentum.
And Johnson knew something else. Momentum can be lost. “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment,” he was to explain. “Timing is essential. Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life.” The time to catch a wave is at its crest. And while the wave of emotion, of affection and adoration, for the martyred young President would roll on for decades—is still rolling on today, almost half a century after Dallas — its crest, the height of the Kennedy tide, came in the weeks immediately following Dallas, in the weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s transition. By rushing to push through Kennedy’s bills, Johnson caught the crest. The maneuvers by which he made them begin to move through Congress were made easier — in some cases were only made possible — by that wave of emotion. Had he not caught the tide at its absolute height, he might well have lost some of its force, and as the Senate fight of 1964 was to demonstrate, every ounce of that force would be necessary to pass the civil rights bill. By moving as quickly as he did, Johnson caught a tide, seized a moment, that might not have lasted very long.
The story of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson will be different in tone from the story of the transition in part because the elements of his personality absent during the transition were shortly to reappear. Yet for a period of time, a brief but crucial moment in history, he had held these elements in check, had overcome them, had, in a way, conquered himself. And by doing so, by overcoming forces within him that were very difficult to overcome, he not only had held the country steady during a difficult time but had set it on a new course, a course toward social justice. In the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this period stands out as different from the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment, as a moment not only masterful but, in its way, heroic.
If he had held in check these forces within him, had conquered himself, for a while, he wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long. But he had done it long enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Lyndon_Johnson
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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At the height of the Cold War we had about 32,000 nuclear weapons, and the Soviets had about 35,000 nuclear weapons. In the late 1940s, when Pentagon strategists were first studying how many nuclear weapons it would take to destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society, the conclusion was maybe 150 to 200, and these were atomic bombs, not even hydrogen bombs. Yet somehow, in less than twenty years, we went from needing 150 to 200 to getting 32,000. Today there are maybe 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Is that too many?
The question is, how many times can you get lucky when you have too many bombs? Eventually, luck runs out. One mind-boggling thing is that the safety problems with our nuclear weapons were recognized by around 1969 or 1970 – but it took almost 20 years for those problems to be fixed. One of the heroes is a weapon designer named Bob Peurifoy, who fought a bureaucratic battle for years to get modern safety devices installed in our nuclear weapons. You'd think that wouldn't be a controversial thing to do. But there was this enormous sense of bureaucratic denial, a refusal to admit error and confront the problem.
One of the psychological phenomena that the book explores is bureaucratic groupthink, a dangerous form of complacency. There was this dangerous attitude about the possibility of an accidental nuclear detonation: if it hasn't happened, it won't happen. Or, if it hasn't happened, it can't happen. Unfortunately, low probability things do happen. Thus far we've been very lucky that the accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon isn't one of those things.
So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted.
More at www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5812066/a-new-report-shows-nuclear-weapons-almos
t-detonated-in-north-carolina and
www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/25/18196416/nuclear-war-boris-yeltsi
n-1995-norway-rocket
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.
You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You kind of missed the point about the H-bombs, didn't you? America could have got along fine with only hundreds of bombs, more than enough to destroy Russia, but Americans wanted a few more bombs than the Russians. The result? 32,000 bombs more than needed at a cost of $10 trillion more than Americans needed to pay. That extra $10 trillion ended up making stock owners of missile builders and submarine builders very rich.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.
You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The secondary point would be that the kind of people who get rich by owning stock in defense contractors are the kind of people who don't think about the safety of the bombs being built. They can't imagine some underpaid Air Force technician accidentally causing an H-bomb to explode. The H-bombs aren't stored near their mansions, so they don't even think about it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Why Taxing the Bejesus Out of the Rich Might Be Useful
https://slate.com/business/2019/01/why-aoc-70-percent-tax-is-smart.htm
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The main reason to hike top tax rates isn’t to keep the deficit in check; it’s simply to keep individuals from becoming too wealthy, because inequality is itself toxic for society.
That’s the argument economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman laid out Tuesday in a New York Times op-ed. Their hook, of course, is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s idea to raise the top tax rate to 70 percent on incomes of more than $10 million, which has sparked a month long debate about the virtues of soaking the rich. Saez’s own work has featured heavily in that conversation; in 2011, he co-authored a well-regarded paper that suggested the economically optimal top tax rate would be 73 percent, research that has been cited by Paul Krugman, among others. In their Times piece, he and Zucman argue that “root justification” for slapping tax rates on multimillionaires “is not about collecting revenue.” Rather, it’s about “safeguarding democracy against oligarchy.”
This is, suffice to say, a very different way of talking about taxation than what we typically hear in Washington, where the subject is treated as a necessary evil and hiking rates on millionaires is framed in terms of making the affluent pay their “fair share.” Saez and Zucman, like many on the left, don’t think of the issue that way. Instead, they believe the ultra-rich themselves are a policy problem the government needs to address, because an “extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power.” (See: Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, the Mercers, Tom Steyer, etc.)
The economists note, for instance, that the 90 percent tax rates of the 1950s only applied to a minuscule slice of Americans whose earnings amounted to about $6.7 million or more in today’s dollars. Conservatives often present this fact as evidence that those rates were a mostly symbolic sham. But Saez and Zucman suggest that the opposite was true. The fact that hardly anybody paid those rates was a sign of their near-total success:
That few people faced the 90 percent top tax rates was not a bug; it was the feature that caused sky-high incomes to largely disappear. The point of high top marginal income tax rates is to constrain the immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the United States came as close as any democratic country ever did to imposing a legal maximum income. The inequality of pretax income shrunk dramatically.
More at https://slate.com/business/2019/01/why-aoc-70-percent-tax-is-smart.htm
l
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You kind of missed the point about the H-bombs, didn't you? America could have got along fine with only hundreds of bombs, more than enough to destroy Russia, but Americans wanted a few more bombs than the Russians. The result? 32,000 bombs more than needed at a cost of $10 trillion more than Americans needed to pay. That extra $10 trillion ended up making stock owners of missile builders and submarine builders very rich.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.
You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I'm in agreement with that point. The folly of man, and all of that. Too much is never enough. Who's got the bigger dick? etc.
That wasn't the point of the article though. The point of the article was fear, pure and simple. It was designed to make people who already freak out about everything they can't control in their lives to have another terrible possible future to obsesses about. Then it's further summed up in your post by your closing statement "So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted."
Not sure why you made the effort to remove the ", man" from that statement. I'm assuming you were correcting the juvenile writing style of the Vox "reporter", and not removing some SJW patriarchy trigger. I'd say the opposite if it were some of the other posters here.
Hell, the original 2nd article was entirely different than the one linked, which is now removed, and no doubt was completely focused on the fact that there wouldn't have even been a Hillary Clinton to run against Trump if the Damascus bomb had detonated in 1980.
Quote:
Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that Arkansas wouldn’t exist if the Damascus bomb had gone off (and then-governor Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton would have perished), but a look at nuclear researcher Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP suggests that Little Rock probably would have been spared the blast. The language has been changed. Thanks to Paul McGrane for the pointer.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, you are not quite right. To make it more obvious: it makes perfect sense to overspend by $10 trillion on H-bombs and delivery systems, but only if you are rich and all that money is going into your bank accounts. On the other hand, it make no sense for the poorer people who are making the rich richer to believe the sales pitch of the rich who are appealing to less-than-thoughtful fears of being murdered by 1) terrorists, 2) illegal aliens, and 3) Russians. The Defense Industry rotates thru 1, 2 & 3 in search of whatever will efficiently get Americans and their Congress to buy more "defense".
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm in agreement with that point. The folly of man, and all of that. Too much is never enough. Who's got the bigger dick? etc.
That wasn't the point of the article though. The point of the article was fear, pure and simple. It was designed to make people who already freak out about everything they can't control in their lives to have another terrible possible future to obsesses about. Then it's further summed up in your post by your closing statement "So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted."
Trump Says U.S. Defense Spending Is 'Crazy.'
www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/12/04/trump-says-u-s-defense-s
pending-is-crazy-does-that-signal-a-shift/
President Trump shocked the defense establishment on Monday with a tweet describing the current level of U.S. military spending as “crazy,” and endorsing a “meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race.” The president seems to share Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, because the sentiments expressed in his Monday tweet at first blush appear very much at variance with statements he has made in the past about national security.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You will get zero arguments from me that the rich keep getting richer and war is a large part of that machine.
You're actually one of the only Democrats left here that I agree with on military actions and spending. It seems the rest of them have drunk too much of the Neo-Liberal Corporatist Kool Aid.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The problem is not the rich. The problem is Americans and their Congress. When is the last time Congress declared War? 1942. When did the draft end? January 27, 1973. Americans and Congress got awfully sloppy about Wars in the last 46 years because they are not there, aiming and pulling the trigger. They just watch on TV news and avoid physical involvement, which might force them to think clearly. Or not.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You will get zero arguments from me that the rich keep getting richer and war is a large part of that machine.
You're actually one of the only Democrats left here that I agree with on military actions and spending. It seems the rest of them have drunk too much of the Neo-Liberal Corporatist Kool Aid.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The defense industry has built very expensive, profitable, and highly effective killing machines for sell, but the users, the military, pick the wrong targets to kill. Since I quit that business I’ve got no idea how to the fix the problem of hitting the wrong targets, other than don’t allow the President to go to War without Congressional approval. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. Maybe Congress should take sole responsibility, rather than informally delegating it to the Pentagon and White House?
www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/h_multi_sections_and_teasers/WarDecl
arationsbyCongress.htm
I would think that decades of losing wars would make Congress and Americans start thinking carefully about what they are doing with their money when they buy "defense". It is not really the fault of the rich who are selling "defense" that the users with their fingers on the triggers won't think clearly about who to kill and who not to kill. Not enough care and thinking is why America keeps losing wars and spending too much on "defense".
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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