Karen Kwiatkowski writing for The Beacon Journal on Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon:
After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
I understand where the LtCol is coming from on this, as I knew plenty of officers with the same mindset. Hell, I knew some jackasses that felt that if you weren't a member of the Republican Party then you were a traitor to your country. Its a sad but true depiction of life in the Pentagon or in my case the Navy Annex (just up the road from the Pentagon).
Read the rest of her commentary for a disturbing account of today's Pentagon and how this Administration has mucked up the internal workings of DoD:
Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and active-duty military professionals assigned to the USDP/NESA and SP were noticeably uninvolved in key areas of interest to Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. These included Israel, Iraq and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia.
Cross-agency cliques: Much has been written about the role of the founding members of the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy and the American Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the Bush administration. Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to congregate, and an overwhelming number of these appointees having such organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the various agencies — in particular the State Department, the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President.
Groupthink. Defined as “reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view,'' groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted “fact,'' and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view.
But of course to some chickenhawk Administration apologists, LtCol Kwiatkowski is a traitor for simply mentioning this issue. Hell, the simple act of criticizing the Administration for anything lately is likely to get you labeled thusly. Such is the way of simple cowards who send better men and women off to die in their places while they scream "traitor" from the sidelines.