X-treme Proofreading
Well, there's "X-treme cooking," "X-treme Makeovers," and now I just discovered an example of "X-treme Proofreading." I am reading FIASCO: the American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks. It's a devastating potrayal of the lack of planning, mostly by civilians in the Department of Defense for post-invasion Iraq. My blood pressure hasn't been normal for a week.
Anyway, in the book, Ricks writes about Rumsfeld's Under Secretary for Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith, who is/was the darling of the department--at least for Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--and who could not even manage his own office personnel let alone policy concerning troops and Iraq, and post-invasion Iraq.
Ricks writes, and I'm paraphrasing here, that Feith once kept a plane full of American soldiers on the runway for hours while he demanded that the comma-usage in their orders be corrected.
Heads up, kids! If you want to work for the DoD, make sure that you have learned comma usage to a T.
Ricks also notes that the civilians, such as Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, refused to issue orders in the normal written protocol. They issued them as PowerPoint slides, which was a mess since the slide files were huge and could not easily be copied for those in the field. It drove the military crazy.
Heads up again! If you want to work for the DoD, make sure you know how to use PowerPoint as well!
To quote Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "Who ARE these guys?"
Well, there's "X-treme cooking," "X-treme Makeovers," and now I just discovered an example of "X-treme Proofreading." I am reading FIASCO: the American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks. It's a devastating potrayal of the lack of planning, mostly by civilians in the Department of Defense for post-invasion Iraq. My blood pressure hasn't been normal for a week.
Anyway, in the book, Ricks writes about Rumsfeld's Under Secretary for Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith, who is/was the darling of the department--at least for Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--and who could not even manage his own office personnel let alone policy concerning troops and Iraq, and post-invasion Iraq.
Ricks writes, and I'm paraphrasing here, that Feith once kept a plane full of American soldiers on the runway for hours while he demanded that the comma-usage in their orders be corrected.
Heads up, kids! If you want to work for the DoD, make sure that you have learned comma usage to a T.
Ricks also notes that the civilians, such as Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, refused to issue orders in the normal written protocol. They issued them as PowerPoint slides, which was a mess since the slide files were huge and could not easily be copied for those in the field. It drove the military crazy.
Heads up again! If you want to work for the DoD, make sure you know how to use PowerPoint as well!
To quote Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "Who ARE these guys?"
Labels: Gin Rummy
posted by mariestaad at 1:10 PM
1 Comments:
To be honest, I don't think that, from rumsfeld/cheney/bush's perspective it actually was bad planning, aside from the recent (and I mean recent, 2/3 of Americans supported the Iraq invasion after they launched their propaganda campaign) public turn against republicans. They succeeded in their goals, which were basically 1) create a military base in the heart of the middle east, which they have in the heavily fortified and free-from-civil-war Green Zone, and 2) secure "uninhibited access" (in Clinton's words) to Iraq's oil, which was the main, and only, priority of troops upon having successfully conquered the country, even while whole-scale looting (widely believed to have funded the current sectarian militias) was going on.
What pains me is that half a million Iraqis and thousands of desparate working-class american( soldier)s had to be sacrificied for their greed and imperialism.
Another good book on Iraq (among other things) is Chomsky's recent Failed States, in case you still want to read about the subject after this book is finished. Perhaps you should read something from the comedy genre first to calm down a bit though... Dave Barry books are good for that.
My most recent reading was "The Secret Man" by Bob Woodward about Mark Felt, a.k.a. "Deep Throat." You might like that one too...
Tack for din tid, tar dig lugnt.
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