From Hardball last night General Anthony Zinni's prepective on what needs to change in this country.
He's dead on and the sad truth for me is it's not going to happen. But read on and hope.
ZINNI: I think first of all we have to come to grips with the world we have today. There are parts of the world that are unstable to generate all the problems we have, whether it has to do with illegal immigration, drugs, terrorism, whatever. We`ve got to take our role as a leader in the world, energize the rest of the world to deal with these, to try to stabilize these parts of the world.
I think it`s important to look at what we have back here to do that. We have an archaic system of governance, we have an organization of government that has bloated bureaucracy, patronage, pork, it needs to be revamped totally. We need a new strategy.
The watershed event was not 9/11, that was a tragic outcome. The watershed event was 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The rise of globalism, the information age, the access to technology, the ability to move around the world. It generated and unleashed all this sort of confluence of events, the perfect storm, that`s what the book is about.
We need a new strategy for a new world, we need to understand it different and we have to get rid of this old bloated bureaucracy that we have. We saw the effects of this in Katrina and elsewhere. It isn`t integrated, it doesn`t cross-communicate, it`s too structured, has too many layers and levels. Can`t make the right kinds of decisions. The president can`t get the right kind of information.
MATTHEWS: If you were commander-in-chief and you had to direct the country in a new direction, what would it be?
ZINNI: The first thing I would do is do what Harry Truman did with the National Security Act of 1947. We need to look at some kind of Goldwater-Nichols integrating change of our structure. I would get rid of the patronage system. I would convince Congress to crack down on the pork and the waste that goes on. I would build a set of programs and build partnerships with international agencies, the United Nations, NATO, European Union, the first world countries, to deal with the unstable third world countries.
I would put an effort in to empowering and building capacity in the countries and the regions to help themselves, so we don`t pay the big price in intervention. That`s the answer to the future. Building capacity, building institutions, in unstable parts of the world, places where they`re growing poppies and cocoa leaves and they`re destroying the environment, where the hatred and the political and economic conditions are giving rise to angry young men that want to go off and blow themselves up.
If we don`t cure it there, it`s going to come and wash up on our shores. We cannot defend ourselves here. It`s not a matter of larger walls on our border and a greater homeland security and checking more containers. It`s going to the source of the problem and fixing it.
Full transcript here
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...