There is no doubt the threat posed by extremists willing to use terrorist tactics is real, and it must therefore be addressed by the American government. Choosing to initiate a war of choice against a murderous dictator in Iraq may or may not have been a wise decision, but regardless of your particular political stripe, the prosecution of that war has exposed several serious limitations of our democratic government.
Extremist terrorism is a serious threat–but it is overshadowing a far graver, if less publicized, situation domestically. This is not an allusion to the undermining of civil rights, though that may be a component of this larger problem. Rather, the Iraq war has, in the first place, revealed serious structural flaws in our government bureaucracy. There is no “unified command” not just in the field, but in the Washington leadership structure as well. One group is tasked with developing solutions to a given problem, but another (or several) is supposed to implement these solutions, and as a result, there is no responsibility and no accountability. Second, because information can travel so quickly, commanders in the field are expected to seek counsel from government leaders at home for issues they would otherwise have to address independently, and that process slows the actual action of decision down significantly. And third, the war has revealed that obstructive personalities in key positions can disrupt the flow of information with potentially damaging results–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield’s efforts to centralize the Department of Defense within himself, documented in Woodward’s State of Denial, emasculated the highest ranking military leadership and deprived the President of independent military advice and analysis. That the president failed to seek differing opinions is a fault all his own, exacerbated by the stakes of American involvement in Iraq.
