But first I want stockades on the Mall; right near The Washington Monument would be fine with me.
I won't print the whole transcript here, but this is an interesting link: http://www.state.gov/s/p/of/proc/tr/index.cfm?docid=3719.
General Zinni was one of the generals that she traveled with and worked with for her book, The Proconsuls.
One snippet:
>>>> Not only didn’t the Service Chiefs realize how much the job of the CINCs had evolved since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986, but also the Joint Staff was just beginning to see the larger picture. The White House had snapshots from the crisis du jour. And Congress, I think, really still doesn’t understand. The Goldwaters-Nichols Act was meant to push the notion of joint military operations, to empower one person to order the services to work together. Each and every service chief opposed its passage. It grew directly out of the aborted attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran, which failed, in part, because the Air Force and the Navy didn’t cooperate. Someone had to be given the power to make the services work together. They were not going to do it on their own. The position of CINC was the logical choice. It made so much sense militarily, and the CINCs’ staffs began to grow to accommodate the shift in authority. But since war is rare -- knock on wood -- the CINCs also got tasked in the post-Cold War with this shaping mission. In fact, that takes up a vast amount of their resources and the majority of a CINC’s time. But [this role] has evolved without a grand strategy or a centralized look and without much of a systematic lash up between other obvious parts of the U.S. Government namely State, Commerce, and Justice.
(snip)
The conventional wisdom is that President Clinton and the military never got along. The reality is, under Clinton’s watch, the military came to outrank its civilian chain of command in influence, authority, and resources in many parts of the world. How did this come about? The Clinton administration’s poor relations with congressional Republicans, especially in the area of foreign policy, led the White House to drop contentious fights over State Department funding and international diplomatic initiatives. They knew that they would get little resistance, however, from Defense committees. Secondly, I think, the management of the State Department under Secretary Albright fed this imbalance. Whatever her legacy abroad, she was unable to make the case for America’s diplomatic corps at home. Its resources, esprit, and innovation continued to plummet. >>>
Is she suggesting the military mess of which she writes is of Carter and Clinton's making???
Pinz