It’s a given that President Bush has made mistakes.
It’s a given that a “President Kerry” would make mistakes.
My issue with Kerry is that he seems in many ways to be dead set on repeating President Bush’s mistakes, and making new, possibly worse ones.
Our fundamental problem in Iraq seems to be too much top-down imposition of “big projects” with “big goals”. In other words, all the things that bug me about the US government at home. America in civilian accomplishes most tasks with a sort of “positive chaos”. That is, you have millions of people every day making decisions that move us forward at a breathtaking clip. Mistakes get fixed quickly, and things move well. This even applies in our military: We run our military in such a way that we have more sergeants per soldier then any other army. That’s because we expect our sergeants to make decisions that normally only officers in other armies make.
The government on the other hand, being huge and unwieldy, tries to accomplish everything from the top down with huge, overly structured “positive order” campaigns. Its slow, and mistakes drag out for months, years, or decades.
When we apply that to Iraq, we see a situation with out any “negative order”, but much “negative chaos”. Our initial approach to combating this was “positive order”. The CPA had a lot of money to spend, and lots of bureaucracy, and paperwork. It took them forever to get anything done, so much so that much of the reconstruction money was unspent.
When the Iraqis took over, unfortunately, they’re just as bureaucratic as we are, so things are still moving slowly a year later.
On the military front, any “response” takes the local military at least an hour of “staging”. An hour which usually decides the situation one way or another. Again, big, massive, slow over-control of everything.
What is really needed in Iraq is some positive chaos. Unfortunately, outside of the military, no one in the civilian side has any experience in this sort of action. What we need are lots of small, focused actions. For instance, on every block, knock at the door of a guy on the corner and offer him $200 if by next week, the street is cleaned. Let him worry about how it gets done. Or one of the best things we could do is to fully fund each commanders discretionary fund since those funds have been tapped out at this point. (Can’t remember the acronym for this.)
So those are my complaints about how the war has been run so far in Iraq.
Now if I look at the candidates, I really can’t believe that Senator Kerry will be smart enough to abandon bureaucracy and top-down solutions in Iraq when he seems so focused on bureaucracy and top-down solutions in his domestic policies. So I see him repeating the same mistakes by promoting “big ideas” to “fix” Iraq. So it would be this huge reset of all the things we’ve learned in Iraq over the last year.
Since President Bush seems to believe in small-scale solutions in his domestic policy (which he calls “ownership”), my hope is that President Bush will be reelected, and start doing more small scale promotion in his foreign policy in addition to his domestic policy.
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