Saturday, August 11, 2007

David Halberstam & Charles Ferguson

What do these two have in common?

They both have authoritatively described America's descent into two catastrophic foreign policy disasters.


In his definitive book The Best and Brightest, David Halberstam chronicled how John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon allowed our country to become mired in a 9-years quagmire which cost us 50,000 KIA.
In his new documentary, The Worst and the Stupidest, No End In Sight, Charles Ferguson takes a detailed look at our current Iraquagmire. Ferguson toured Iraq with his own security detail, picked the brains of other first-rate reporters and academics and interviewed an array of President Bush appointees who tried and failed to shape Iraq policy, such as Richard Armitage, ex-Deputy Secretary of State, and Robert Hutchings, The principals in this tragedy - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice - wouldn't talk to him. Bush is a relatively minor player in the story which is steeped not merely in bungling, but arrogance and incompetence on a grand scale.