MemeMachineGo!

This has been out for a while, and commented on in a few other places such as Making Light and Slate. But I thought it was still worth posting here.

It's been said that "military intelligence" is an oxymoron. But every now and then, a truly intelligent, clear-thinking, and dedicated person will speak up and provide some reasssurance that the defense of this country and what it stands for are in good hands. Or at least could be, if such people weren't stifled and ignored by people with too much political power and too little brainpower.

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff at the Department of State, is a very smart man who's not afraid to tell the truth. And the truth isn't very welcome if you're a George W. Bush loyalist.

This guy is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. He was a director of the Marine Corps War College, and the president he most admires is the elder Bush. He spoke at the New America Foundation, a think tank that advocates a strong American presence on the world scene. I've seen this speech excerpted in a few different articles, but I find it so powerful and compelling that I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Here's what he has to say about the current government:

And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.... Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.

[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

And on the subject of our consumption-based society, he comes out and says what everyone must realize, just as a fact of daily living, but no one is willing to discuss the broader implications:

The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption ... we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources. Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets. We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious we thought about it.

A full transcript of the speech can be found at: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/Wilkerson%20Speech%20--%20WEB.htm