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http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/Автор ресурса - американский политик и финансист с Уолл стрит
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/about-david-stockman-and-contra-corner/ Он и сам пишет и других авторов публикует.
Вот интереснейшая статья
Конец Американской Империи
The End Of The American Empire Она очень большая. Мне там больше всего понравилось описание работы и эволюции работы американского органа под названием Совет Национальной Безопасности.
The National Security Council is a cabinet body established
in 1947 as the Cold War began to discuss and coordinate policy as directed by the president. It originally had no staff or policy role independent of the cabinet. The modern NSC staff began with President Kennedy. He wanted a few assistants to help him run a hands-on, activist foreign policy. So far, so good. But the staff he created has grown over decades to replace the cabinet as the center of gravity in Washington’s decisions on foreign affairs. And, as it has evolved, its main task has become to make sure that foreign relations don’t get the president in trouble in Washington.
Kennedy’s initial NSC staff numbered six men, some of whom, like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, achieved infamy as the authors of the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, when Ronald Reagan took office, the NSC staff had grown to around 50.
By the time Barack Obama became president in 2009, it numbered about 370, plus another 230 or so people off the books and on temporary duty,
for a total of around 600. The bloat has not abated. If anyone knows how many men and women now man the NSC, he or she is not talking. The NSC staff, like the department of defense, has never been audited.
What was once a personal staff for the president has long since become an independent agency whose official and temporary employees duplicate the subject expertise of executive branch departments. This relieves the president of the need to draw on the insights, resources, and checks and balances of the government as a whole, while enabling the centralization of power in the White House. The NSC staff has achieved critical mass. It has become a bureaucracy whose officers look mainly to each other for affirmation, not to the civil, military, foreign, or intelligence services. Their focus is on protecting or enhancing the president’s domestic political reputation by trimming foreign policy to the parameters of the Washington bubble. Results abroad are important mainly to the extent they serve this objective.
From the National Security Adviser on down, NSC staff members are not confirmed by the Senate. They are immune from congressional or public oversight on grounds of executive privilege. Recent cabinet secretaries—especially secretaries of defense—have consistently complained that NSC staffers no longer coordinate and monitor policy formulation and implementation but seek to direct policy and to carry out diplomatic and military policy functions on their own. This leaves the cabinet departments to clean up after them as well as cover for them in congressional testimony. Remember Oliver North, the Iran-Contra fiasco, and the key-shaped cake? That episode suggested that the Keystone Cops might have seized control of our foreign policy. That was a glimpse of a future that has now arrived.
Size and numbers matter. Among other things, they foster overspecialization. This creates what the Chinese call the “jing di zhi wa” phenomenon—the narrow vision of a frog at the bottom of a well. The frog looks up and sees a tiny circle of light that it imagines is the entire universe outside its habitat. With so many people now on the NSC staff, there are now a hundred frogs in a hundred wells, each evaluating what is happening in the world by the little bit of reality it perceives. There is no effective process that synergizes a comprehensive appreciation of trends, events, and their causes from these fragmentary views.
T
his decision-making structure makes strategic reasoning next to impossible. It all but guarantees that the response to any stimulus will be narrowly tactical. It focuses the government on the buzz
du jour in Washington, not what is important to the long-term wellbeing of the United States. And it makes its decisions mainly by reference to their impact at home, not abroad. Not incidentally, this system also removes foreign policy from the congressional oversight that the Constitution prescribes. As such, it adds to the rancor in relations between the executive and legislative branches of the federal establishment.
In many ways too, the NSC staff has evolved to resemble the machinery in a planetarium. It turns this way and that and, to those within its ambit, the heavens appear to turn with it. But this is an apparatus that projects illusions. Inside its event horizon, everything is comfortingly predictable. Outside—who knows?—there may be a hurricane brewing.
This is a system that creates and implements foreign policies suited to Washington narratives but detached from external realities, often to the point of delusion, as America’s misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria illustrate. And the system never admits mistakes. To do so would be a political gaffe, even if it might be a learning experience.
СНБ был основан Кеннеди в 1947 году и состоял из 6 человек. К 2009 году, когда президентом стал Барак Обама СНБ насчитывал около 600 человек, из которых 370 были постоянными членами, а еще около 230 подвизались на разных временных ролях. Аудит СНБ никогда не проводился. Сама система необыкновенно забюрократизирована и левая рука там не знает, что делает правая, а голова не знает, в какую сторону вертеться.
Автор сравнивает работников СНБ с jing di zhi wa - китайскими лягушками, которые сидят на дне глубоких колодцев и видят наверху маленький кружочек неба, который для каждой из них представляет вселенную. Обзор у них сильно ограничен и принимаемые решения по меньшей мере узколобы.
Саму систему автор сравнивает с планетарием, внутри которого все красиво вертится, машины работают и создают виртуальную реальность неба, при этом никто не знает, а что там снаружи планетария с небом происходит, может уже давно какой ураган.
При этом ошибки СНБ никогда никем не признаются.