The point about the White House being busy with the war, and being, well, inattentive to other matters seems well taken.

If nothing else, the Harriet Miers business just screams that it was the product of distracted management -- she was the lady who vetted judges: "we have to pick a justice ? Oh let Harriet do it."

That said, part of successful war leadership, as the Germans found out in August 1918, and the Johnson administration after Tet, is managing expectations on the home front, and working actively to keep up public morale.

Maybe the job is just too big ? Maybe it's not possible to run a war -- to manage diplomatic military affairs across the entire planet; get all the details right AND run domestic business.

Maybe the job IS too big, or maybe we don't have the right command and control mechanism. Not more bureaucracy, mind you, but the RIGHT KIND of bureaucracy. . .maybe some kind of updated 21st century/4th generation politico-military general staff. Something that can evaluate the kind of enemies we face, then construct a strategy that, in advance, works out the political, military, and even financial cultural side implications of what we need to do.

I'm thinking bigger than a General Staff, because it has to be political -- and even commercial too (and include everybody).

El Jefe,

I'm thinking along the opposite line as you: I think instead everything should be extremely decentralized, with elected officials -- through popular consent -- setting some sort of very very simple central strategic direction. A sort of networked, organic, complex system, instead of a larger top-down one. I think the days of hierarchies being very effective at anything are numbered.

Hmmm...I was trying to be vaguer than that...wasn't necessarily arguing for centralized, but wasn't arguing the other way either.

I don't think centralization would work either, as a matter of fact. Probably the problem is that my frames of reference were all centralized...a bit of indictment of my thinking right there, eh ?

Characterizing an organic system is a slippery proposition. Once you say what it is, then you have to explain away the instances when it is something else too.

Maybe such an organic system is growing right before our eyes and we just don't know it yet.

Chester,

I agree with you that trimming the domestic bureaucracy would help the war effeort, but in likely outcome think the opposite is true - government will grow until it (or its supporting civilization) collapses under its own weight.

Bush's trillion-dollar medicare expansion, education boondoggle, etc. on top of the war effort threaten a dollar currency collapse in the next 5 years.

In the domestic realm I blame Rove for the plan and Bush for listening to Rove, Miers perhaps being Bush's only independent domestic move of note.