November 02, 2003

Our Geopolitical Situation, Dispassionately Assessed

Shorter Zbigniew Brzezinski: We're fucked.

Shorter Paul Krugman: We're fucked, and the GOP is charging for it. (From what my friend John Burke calls The New York Review of Each Others' Books.)

Shorter Donald Rumsfeld: Um, guys, we're not fucked or anything, right? Right? Guys? [The ridicule the bit about "metrics" has attracted is however unfair. Absent explicit, formalized ways of assessing performance and progress towards goals, any enterprise is guided by an implicit metric, viz., "happiness of those in charge". One advantage of formal criteria is that they're public and explicit, so they can be criticized, debated and improved. They can even force those in charge to admit that their pet ideas aren't working. Of course you can pick bad metrics which mis-direct your efforts, but that's because they're bad metrics.]

Shorter Daniel Benjamin: Oh, we're fucked alright.

Shorter Steven Weinberg: We're so fucked we're not even fighting the last war.

While I'm on the subject: our lessons learned and theirs. (The full Army report is very interesting, actually.)

Trackback:
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The Continuing Crisis

Posted at November 02, 2003 12:41 | permanent link

Three-Toed Sloth