July 1, 2008--The Gang That Can't Shoot Straight

On Saturday we learned that the army’s official historian is about to issue the second volume of its account of the war in Iraq. The army does this sort of thing routinely so they can learn from their experience. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The first volume covered the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein and concluded that, regardless of what one thinks about the war, it went well.

The second volume is about the ugly. How the Bush administration did not have a Plan B beyond they-will-welcome-us-as-liberators-and-immediately-become a-Western-style-democracy.

It is a tale of miscalculation after miscalculation with blame enough to share between the President and Vice President, the then Secretary of Defense, the generals on the ground, the diplomats, private contractors, and the civilian administrators.

Then on Sunday there was an extensive New York Times report about our failure to develop and execute an effective plan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda. This was because there was squabbling between and amongst all parts of the Bush administration—the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security staff and again the generals and civilians on the ground in Afghanistan. (Article below.)

In this postmortem there is evidence that the war in Iraq sapped and diluted the strength and numbers of our Special Operations forces, the troops whose job it would have been to track down Bin Laden and mop up the rest of al Qaeda after they were effectively driven out of their Tora Bora stronghold.

There is also the conclusion that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was so shook up by his strategic blunders in Iraq that he was afraid to repeat them on an even more dangerous scale by approving an operation in Afghanistan-Pakistan that would perhaps turn out to be another Bay of Pigs. So much for his self-vaunted testosterone-ladened strutting.

Then in a metaphorically-related story, the Times today reports that the work to rebuild the World Trade Center site is hopelessly behind schedule. (Also linked below.)

The memorial to the people who were killed will now not be completed by the tenth anniversary of the attack. The $2.5 billion PATH subway station is behind schedule and way over budget. The final design, almost seven years after the assault, is not yet completed! Also, the demolition of the condemned Deutsche Bank where a number of firemen were killed in a fire recently because the contractors working on the site shut off the water supply to the hydrants, the work to tear down the building is at least 14 months behind schedule.

And worst of all, the aching wound that still marks the devastation, loss of life, and our national humiliation is still open and festering.

Rebuilding was first delayed by squabbling over the design, then by the greed of the site owner, Larry Silverstein, who saw this as an opportunity to make hundreds of millions for himself, the so-called Freedom Tower is also way behind schedule and over budget. There are already so many overruns that it is estimated the original $15 billion price tag for all the projects is likely to add up to many billions more.

During the depths of the Great Depression, in 1930, a decision was made to erect the world’s tallest building—the Empire State Building. Drawings for the construction took two weeks, yes weeks, to complete; and the entire job took just 17 months from ground breaking to ribbon cutting. This at a time when all rivets were “hot” and for a building that was faced with granite.

We’re not talking a quick-and-dirty job. It is quite an architectural and construction masterpiece. In fact, when a B-25 bomber accidentally crashed into its 79th floor in 1945 the building hardly shook on its foundation.

Thus, all of this contemporary incompetence and loss of will make me crazy. Where, how did we lose our way?