Verizon in Iran

This article in today's Times, which properly would be titled "Propoganda for Me, but Not for Thee," is full of stationary targets, but the broader conclusion, reinforced by nearly every bit of reporting on the American military's situational behavior, is that the American military leadership is second only to the American congress in its high-majority percentage of buffoonery. God bless you, Colonel Patrick Lang; you're a truly learned, eloquent, and admirable man; but let's be plain: Gilbert and Sullivan's Queen's Navy reads as the heights of professionalism and martial achievement compared to these guys.

What's rather shocking, actually, is the degree to which these sorts of institutional fuck-ups--bungled attempts to recast failures as successes in most cases--reveal the "military culture" to be no different from our much-satirized contemporary office culture. It has the same petty territorialisms, the same cowed inferiors, the same methods of rank-climbing, the same inscrutable systems for awarding advancement to those evidently least deserving, the same bathetic personal efforts at individuation, the same resentments of blame-impervious management and leadership, the same little indignities, the same habits of breeding odd organizational rites and behaviors, the same habit of crafting obfuscatory language with an alacrity that, redirected to something useful, might produce achievement rather than endless streams of over-worded, transparent excuses. The difference, of course, is the presence of guns and bombs, and so to the cruise-missile left and interventionist right, you world-savers and democracy-bringers, I ask you: Would you trust your cell phone provider to run a country, and if not, why do you trust your army to do the same?