Heavy hitting memo to Donald Rumsfeld from Steve Clemons, who has the New America Foundation blog just mentioned. Choice quote below.
Before 9-11, you were keen on weaning generals off of their Cold War era toys. You were on the right track: demonstrating that civilian authority over the military continues to function while realigning the services and their assets to meet real-not imagined-emerging threats. Does it really make sense to spend a trillion dollars on missile defense over the next thirty years when American civil infrastructure remains dangerously vulnerable to low tech terror? You must get back on track. Begin by questioning those Project for a New American Century memos that demand doubling the defense budget. Then start pursuing American security through smart choices about realignment and withdrawal from parts of the globe where American presence may actually be a greater source of instability than stability.
It all seems to jive perfectly with the sense left by O’Neills story told to Ron Suskind, Clarke’s story of the anti-terrorism nightmares with this administration and their blind insistence to fight a war with Iraq to pass off as a war on terror, and Joseph Wilson’s fact finding trip that didn’t tell the administration what it wanted to hear (and also a fascinating account by an anonynous presently active intellignece official called Imperial Hubris, which I have just gotten into today — fascinating history of Afganistan, a nd how the US is repeating the same mistakes made by the soviets.)