Representative Drake, you are way out of your league. Don't take this personally. After all, you are in a very large association of like-minded sycophants. I've known a lot about people with a narrow world view. I spent a lot of my youth in the woods. I hunted with people whose perspective was limited to the forest where they chased dogs chasing opossums and tried to scare up a squirrel or two by tramping through the underbrush. But they didn't go around mimicking the people they served or caddied for at the country club in hopes of being mistaken for a captain of industry. You could take a lesson from them. They were salt of the earth people who recognized their limits and strove to expand their horizons. They would never put on airs that they knew they couldn't live up to. You seem to think that by babbling quaint phrases that your President's front men have stolen from serious military thinkers, you might be confused for a competent member of Congress and sharp doctrinal student. You are just confused.
I could write volumes about the simple quote on the front page of the Virginian-Pilot on Friday. But this is a blog and I'll keep it short. The founders of this country made a conscious decision that the military would serve a civil authority. The President doesn't adorn himself in a uniform with rows of medals even when he has been a general. The civil authority writes strategy and chooses from courses of action proposed by subordinates to achieve them. Those courses of action are constrained by the guidance contained in the original strategy. One of the criteria for any plan is that it is acceptable. You can find this in doctrine fairly easily, but I don't think anyone on your staff would know where to look. To translate: at the highest levels, you don't deliver a plan that doesn't align with the President's world view (ie. you take his or her assumptions as fact). Generals in the field practice operational art (or they are supposed to). That art is to take the tactical tools provided by the nation and employ them in a manner that achieves the strategic objective. In Iraq that translates into "make a silk purse from a sow's ear."
You might be very disappointed to learn that generals don't write plans, they sign them. Plans are pretty much the product of younger, more energetic majors (fresh from a couple of years of intense study) being bothered by lieutenant colonels to meet deadlines. I spent a lot of time on some of those plans. I spent a lot of time teaching people how to plan. It wasn't until the Bush administration and the Rumsfeld "transformation" that I found myself writing fiction.
Now you have relegated the decision of the nation's strategy to the generals in the field. Very convenient when they deliver the plan the President directed to be written. What about the Admiral in Tampa? Heck, what about the people from whom all power in this nation is vested? You ought to study the constitution. You ought to read President Washington's Farewell Address. You ought to be introspective and never use talking points that clearly daze you.
Your recent comments about sheiks in Iraq sitting down with each other has any Arabist roiling in laughter at your naivet+¬. But it's your world view. It must be nice and neat in there. And it must be associated with the parallel universe (or as Dan Froomkin calls it, Planet Bush) from which the President draws his. You probably accept that Iraq is a deserving ally to whose aid we must now ride. You likely think we have 36 countries fighting alongside us. You might even think that those sheiks were sincere and impressed by you. And that inshallah means something positive. As my old hunting buddies used to say, that dog won't hunt. And that's too bad, because this is a time when we need the finest representation possible. Not someone who is lathering to carry a pretender's water.
Every time Bush speaks there is cognitive dissonance. g is that the authoritarian-minded Republican Party is now full of people just like Representative Thelma DEvery time Bush speaks we see again that he has not the slightest understanding of the remarkable Constitutional divison of government power devised in Philadelphia, which means he has no understanding of the limitations on executive power, nor the slightest appreciation of the place of the military in a free republic. Every time Bush speaks we hear, if we listen closely, that he is only interested in his own accretion of power, and co-incidentally saving his own face, i.e., refusing accountability.
What is so alarminavis. This makes every Republican in public office an unwitting co-conspirator in dismantling our Constitution, even those with brains enough to understand what they're doing--- in whose number Thelma is not included, according to your assessment. She is just one more baa-baa sheep who appears to be overly impressed with herself.