stimpson
%uh
a man of
sober judgment
%uh forestal somebody who tended to
inflate threats
assume the worst
inflate threats assume the worst and insist on
a militarized solution
as the best way to %uh defend %uh against the threat that he
he saw
and in the book i tried to describe are you talking about iraq now just kidding
in the book I try to describe him as the first of a new breed
of national security expert and i think i describe his in a sense successor I don't mean
successor as secretary of defense
about somebody
cut from the same cloth who continues the forestal style as paul nitze %uh very famous
as the author of %uh document called
n_s_c_ sixty-eight which is really one of the
foundational documents of the of the u_s_ strategy in the cold war and i think in many
respects one of
nitze's successors again not in terms of position but in terms of
of mindset
would be paul wolfowitz
%uh who by the time we get to the post nine eleven period
has risen to a position of great influence and again i think had this tendency to
%uh overstate threats to exaggerate danger to the unwillingness to accept risk and to
insist that
the solution to our national security problems lies in the
aggressive use of
of military power so there is a there is a mindset or a set of common assumptions
that tends to %uh
pervade
%uh influential members of the national security elite beginning with
forestal
and i don't mean that these people are have bad intentions or that they they view
themselves as honorable
%uh servants of the %uh state who are trying to do what they think is right but in my own
judgment
in in
recurrent ways
they get things fundamentally wrong and rather than contributing to our security actually
undermine it
yes it's what i consider a lawyeristic kind of thinking
if x than y if y than z and and you point out that they understate the
benefits of doing nothing we would have been much better off doing nothing in vietnam because
all the claims of what would ultimately that all proved to be untrue
that proved to be untrue they
they failed to consider the possibility of letting time
solve the problem and they also failed to gauge
accurately
the consequences
unintended consequences of using force so they imagined that
%uh force can provide a
economical %uh and politically effective solution to a problem
%uh when
history i think would tell us that %uh even if force is necessary at times and it is
%uh that almost always the use of force gives rise to unintended consequences
and it's almost always far more costly
then the advocates of force are willing to acknowledge the iraq war being a perfect example
it's now the second most expensive war in our country's history second only to
to world war two
and the truth is
we we haven't
we're not anywhere close to seeing the last bill it's
already a trillion dollar war it's probably going to be a two trillion dollar war
