Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

Overall, Zinni’s rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today’s conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest. Similar messages can be heard in many parts of the Corps, wherever there are good officers willing to seize the initiative — that is, who care more about their mission and their Marines than they do about their careers. This is how Major Davis at the Drill Instructors School summarizes the Marine Corps way of doing business: “Concentrate on doing a single task as simply as you can, execute it flawlessly, take care of your people, and go home.”That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the “doctrine”that the Army so loves to write and cite. But those four steps offer an efficient way to run any organization.

Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain at the time, provides an illuminating contrast to Orwell. He was as politically naive as Orwell was observant, in part because his macho posing got in the way of seeing accurately.

Rollin’s works were not just records of events, but also instruction manuals about how to live, and especially how to acquire virtue.

As the sociologist Ann Swidler has observed, “common sense”is really just deeply embedded culture: “the set of assumptions so unselfconscious as to seem a natural, transparent undeniable part of the structure of the world.

relatively powerless — the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the

Ask an American soldier to identify himself, and he probably will say he is “in the Army.” By contrast, a Marine — especially if he is one of the better ones — is likely to say, “I’m a Marine.” The small linguistic difference is significant: The first is a matter of membership or occupation; the second speaks to identity.

We do not call ourselves ‘Native American,’ because our blood and people were here long before this land was called the Americas. We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders.

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond. They

foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. That is, Bush could only take such a careless action because of a series of failures in the American system. Major lapses occurred within the national security bureaucracy, from a weak National Security Council (NSC) to an overweening Pentagon and a confused intelligence apparatus. Larger failures of oversight also occurred in the political system, most notably in Congress, and in the inability of the media to find and present alternate sources of information about Iraq and the threat it did or didn’t present

So, he continued, if the government controls the established church, then the church ultimately must answer to the people. Thus, he concludes, the people “have the power to governe the Church, to see her do her duty, & to correct her, to redress, reform, establish, & c.

What bothers him most about today’s military, he goes on to say, is careerism. It has eroded the other services, he warns, and is creeping into the Corps. The only thing you should worry about, he tells the assembled second lieutenants, is taking care of your people. In fact, he recommends adding one new little box to the officer evaluation reports: It would say, Does this officer care more about his career than about his troops? A “yes”mark would terminate that officer’s career.

Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible:

George Washington’s ability to observe and learn seems to me underappreciated. James Madison’s contributions, especially his designing gridlock into the American system, also seem to me to be undervalued. John Adams, by contrast, began to strike me as having an inflated reputation in recent years, with insufficient attention paid to his unhelpful commentary during the War for Independence and also his disastrous presidency. Likewise, though raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found myself disturbed by his habitual avoidance of reality.

Jefferson was notably ambivalent about the French philosopher. “In the science of government Montesquieu’s spirit of laws is generally recommended. It contains indeed a great number of political truths; but almost an equal number of political heresies: so that the reader must be constantly on his guard.