Where Are the Civilians?
If it hopes to achieve its foreign policy agenda, the Obama administration will need to undo the damage to the Foreign Service wrought by the Bush administration.
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All Presidents are dependent on the permanent bureaucracies of government inherited from their predecessors. A President must have the information and analysis of options which the bureaucracies provide in order to anticipate problems and make educated choices. He must, in most cases, also have the coöperation of the bureaucracies to turn his decisions into governmental action. A bureaucracy can effectively defuse a presidential decision by refusing to support it with influential members of Congress or to implement it faithfully.
In Running the World, David Rothkopf provides page after page of raw material on the history and workings of the National Security Council. Unfortunately, the information is not matched by much rigorous analysis.
One does not rise through the bureaucracy as spectacularly as Colin Powell has without shrewd insight into of the game of government. But to understand Powell's views on issues ranging from the use of force to civilian control of the military, one has to return to his foot-soldier origins.

User Comments
civilians & war?
But the question remains profound here. But I am in New Delhi, South Asia and civilian and crime may seem synonymous here - as terms of political socialization!
civilians & war?
A very catchy headline and yes, a pertinent question here. Where are the civilians? What would be a civilian? Many states that are galvanized in many senses - for one war or the other; quixotic or real - have not only a militarization of minds but would also find it better for future security. Many states that have compulsory military service would know what one is talking of and about here.
Yet the question is profound in that sense - of the quest for the civilian and perchance a world that is free from such fears. Of states that can foster generations that grow in the city-state of Atlantis (as some Utopia of negative freedom & positive peace) and not Sparta!
Would Sparta be a dreadful thought for civilians and their existences or would we need a re-imagination of what it really means to be a civilian? Maybe both.
But the question remains profound here. But I am in New Delhi, South Asia and civilian and crime may seem synonymous here - as terms of political socialization!