Colonel Powell Quotes

FATHER OF THE BOY SCOUTS Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, and not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause. One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa: “There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,” Sir Arthur said. Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles. Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa. Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died. The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature.

I taught for 16 years at William and Mary and six years at George Washington University, using as one of my principal text books David Roth's book Running the World. And if you look on — if memory doesn't fail me — about page 12 of the hardback copy of that book, you'll find his five circumstances that influence National Security decision making thus the NSC. Two of them that are prominent, one was absolutely prominent with my boss Colin Powell, are the people doing the decision-making: the characters as David calls them. The depth of their character, the shallow of their character, whatever. Another one though is domestic politics. As I taught my classes on both campuses over the years, my students grew more and more strident, in their assertion in their case studies using this framework for analysis David offers, at saying that the domestic outweighed everything else, and I started paying attention to them. And I started looking at it closely myself, and I think they had a point we are now to that point to your question where nothing that is rational about national security foreign policy, international relations, or the associated fields, is accomplished on the basis of national interest. It's accomplished on the basis of these people's views of their chances in the political arena, and that's where we are today almost without exception. [...] those are the other three things in David's framework for analysis. Ideology slash governing philosophy — and he differentiates those two things, sometimes they blend, of course almost always they blend, but he differentiates them. And then the next one is the structure or process in which the decisions made. Because he was a member of the NSC staff, and he saw often, as did I, the statutory system didn't being used. Dick Cheney just totally ignored the statutory system and made his own decisions in his own office, and communicated them to New York Times so they could be on the front page above the fold right side the next morning. And then we added one. We added one called "budget". And I showed him that Dwight Eisenhower was the very last president to require his (then it was called the office of the budget, OMB now) budget director to give him an assessment of every National Security decision he formerly made, if it incurred cost, and most often it did. We haven't had that since Eisenhower. Nobody cares anymore. The latest one to be asked that by the budget director, by the director of The Office of Management Budget in a formal meeting of the principles, Dick Cheney said: "Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and we went on from there. (Excerpt from interview "US Elections & Imperial Overstretch - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen")