The Obama Administration means well, no question about it. They simply do not know what they do not know, and no one within the US Intelligence Community appears capable of speaking truth to power.
The truth that needs to be spoken is that Washington lacks both integrity and intelligence (as in thoughtful holistic decision-making). Washington lacks a strategic analytic model, it lacks a commitment to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity (terrorism is ninth, a traffic accident, nothing more), and it lacks a process for harmonizing budgets and behavior across twelve core policy domains as illustrated below.
The recent decision on missile defense, combined with other sound decisions by the Secretary of Defense, are hopeful signs, but insufficient, isolated, and therefore troubling.
Money matters. “True costs” is a meme that has not yet reached Versailles on the Potomac. The slide below, from Medard Gabel, #2 to Buckminster Fuller in creating the analog World Game (and the architect for the Earth Intelligence Network's digital EarthGame) says it all. We spend $1.3 trillion a year on waging war, when one third of that amount would give evey person on the planet clean water, a daily diet, and a cell phone with which to unleash their entrepreneurial energy and create infinite wealth.
What's wrong? There is a massive disconnect between the average American and their common sense and wisdom in common, and those in Washington, D.C. who have fallen prey to the Pathology of Power. We atribute this to the twin corruptions outlined by Senator Coburn in his book Breach of Trust; arty-line voting as condemned by Peter Peterson in Running on Empty, and outright whoredom in relation to Wall Street run amok and the Saudi regime and other dictators around the planet–see Ambassador Palmer's the Real Axis of Evil. Washington pays more respect to dictators than it does to its own public.
