It’s broke — so fix it
What can Colin Powell, John Kerry, Frank Carlucci
and Zbigniew Brzezinski all agree on? The US government is no longer
dysfunctional; it’s broken.
What can Colin Powell, John Kerry, Frank Carlucci and Zbigniew Brzezinski all agree on? The US government is no longer dysfunctional; it’s broken.
In his latest book - America’s Promise Restored: Preventing Culture, Crusade and Partisanship from Wrecking Our Nation - columnist and strategic thinker Harlan Ullman delivers a scorching indictment of self-inflicted wounds that have now imperiled democracy itself.
The unalienable right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness has become alienable. For a politician to tell his/her constituents the truth in a democratic country - here the United States is no exception - is to ensure defeat at the next election. A guaranteed laugh line outside the Beltway is “I come to you from Washington, our bilingual capital where truth is now the second language … seldom spoken.”
The war on terror is misguided because the causes of terrorism are ignored. Terror, ideas and ideologies are Al Qaeda’s main weapons against which conventional forces are powerless. Iraq is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in US history. It robbed us of the moral high ground. The crusade in the Middle East to democratize Iraq has unleashed the forces of extremism and totalitarian political ambitions.
A resurgent Asia, immigration, soaring debts and deficits and skyrocketing expenses for retirement plans, health care and energy are but a few of the acute problems that elude bad government. The gap between obligations and resources grows unbridgeable with two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, climbing past the half trillion dollar mark and a defense budget of $500 billion a year that now exceeds what the rest of the world spends on defense, including Russia, China, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
Broken government stems, in large part, from the strength and growing influence of special interest groups and lobbies that all too often represent political extremes and narrow constituencies that agitate outside the mainstream.
Borchgrave moves on to Ullman’s suggestions of five broad remedies to dysfunctional government. I’ve taken enough space here with a precis of his analysis.
Examine his suggestions, separately, collectively.
Posted: Wed - July 12, 2006 at 07:26 AM