As men of God, we are called to be in the world but not of it.
To know what is going on in the world is something I think we are called to as well and to know what is going on.
We can't be mindless Christians living in our bubble, so here is an excerpt about a news article I read.
Hillary Clinton has these "Super-Sub Secretaries" that are handling these issues.
Just so we know some names and I thought this was interesting/funny.
It's crazy how America is in so many world affairs.
So George Mitchell is, in effect, “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Nurturing aCoherent Palestinian Authority and a Coherent Israeli Negotiating Position SoThat the Two Might One Day Be Able to Strike a Deal Again.”
Richard Holbrooke is“Super Sub-Secretary of State for Bringing Coherence to the Afghan and PakistanGovernments So That They Can One Day Be Internally Stable and United Against theTaliban and Al Qaeda.”
And Dennis Ross is “Super Sub-Secretary of State forAmassing Global Leverage on the Incomprehensibly Byzantine Iranian Government SoThat It Will Terminate Its Nuclear Weapons Program.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The full article. It's worth reading.
ReplyDeleteMarch 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Super (Sub) Secretaries
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is way too soon to say what policy breakthroughs Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton will be known for at the State Department. But she has already left her
mark bureaucratically. She has invented new diplomatic positions that say a
great deal about the state of foreign policy in these messy times. I would call
them “The Super Sub-Secretaries of State.”
Mrs. Clinton has appointed three Super Sub-Secretaries — George Mitchell to
handle Arab-Israel negotiations, Richard Holbrooke to manage
Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs and Dennis Ross to coordinate Iran policy. The
Obama team seems to have concluded that these three problems are so intractable
that they require almost full-time secretary of state-quality attention. So you
need officials who have more weight and more time — more weight than the normal
assistant secretary of state so they will be taken seriously in their respective
regions and will have a chance to move the bureaucracy, and more time to work on
each of these discrete, Gordian problems than a secretary of state can devote in
a week.
Some scoff that this approach is a sign of weakness on Mrs. Clinton’s part. I’d
hold off on that. If she can manage this diplomatic A-team, Mrs. Clinton’s
experiment could make a lot of sense. It is a much more disorderly world out there.
After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger set the gold
standard for mediation by negotiating the disengagement agreements between
Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria — the first real peace accords ever struck
between those parties. But Mr. Kissinger had it easy. He basically needed to
forge an agreement between one pharaoh (Anwar Sadat), one military dictator
(Hafez Assad) and one overwhelmingly powerful prime minister (Golda Meir), whose
Labor Party then totally dominated Israel. All three of Kissinger’s
interlocutors could speak for their people and deliver and sustain any agreements.
That is not true today in the main theaters of conflict where the parties are
either failing states with multiple power centers — Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Palestine — or strong states with governments so fractious and hydra-headed that
they border on paralyzed — Israel and Iran. The political struggles in these
societies are so virulent today that until they are defused, it will be very
difficult to make any deals between them. That is why you need sub-secretaries
of state.
So George Mitchell is, in effect, “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Nurturing a
Coherent Palestinian Authority and a Coherent Israeli Negotiating Position So
That the Two Might One Day Be Able to Strike a Deal Again.” Richard Holbrooke is
“Super Sub-Secretary of State for Bringing Coherence to the Afghan and Pakistan
Governments So That They Can One Day Be Internally Stable and United Against the
Taliban and Al Qaeda.” And Dennis Ross is “Super Sub-Secretary of State for
Amassing Global Leverage on the Incomprehensibly Byzantine Iranian Government So
That It Will Terminate Its Nuclear Weapons Program.”
In the cold war, the world was divided between East and West, and the Soviet
Union could be counted on to aid, prop up and sometimes deliver the weaker
states in its orbit. Today, the world is divided between “the regions of order”
and “the regions of disorder,” and the regions of disorder are big enough and
disorderly enough that they each require their own super sub-secretary of state
to manage the chaos and mobilize the coalitions.
“The world today can be much better understood if you think of it from the
perspective of regions and not states,” said Gen. Jim Jones, President Obama’s
national security adviser. And the regions of disorder are likely to multiply as
the world’s economic crisis metastasizes.
“As we look at 2009, on every issue, with the single exception of Iraq,
everything is worse,” said Ian Bremmer, co-author of “The Fat Tail,” about the
biggest risks facing the world’s decision-makers. “Pakistan is worse.
Afghanistan is worse. Russia is worse. Emerging markets are worse. Everything
big out there is worse, and some will be made even worse by the economic crisis.”
There is a geopolitical storm coming, concluded Bremmer, “and it is not priced
into the market yet.”
Did anyone notice that the State Department issued a travel advisory for Mexico
last week, warning that “Recent Mexican Army and police confrontations with drug
cartels have resembled small-unit combat ... Large firefights have taken place
in many towns and cities across Mexico ... During some of these incidents, U.S.
citizens have been trapped.” That is Mexico, not Pakistan!
“As the effects of the economic crisis spread and viable states become weak
states and weak states become failed states, it is going to produce a series of
geopolitical brush fires, if we are lucky, and real conflagrations, if we are
not,” argued David Rothkopf, author of Running the World, a history of the
National Security Council. “They will each demand the attention and resources of
a government that already has limited bandwidth and an empty piggybank.”
No, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have too many super sub-secretaries. The truth is, she
may not have enough.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
This article is very interesting. I like the Super Sub-Secretary thing, but at the same time, I don't like it because it adds another level of bureaucracy, which i hate. Hopefully, the Super Sub-Secretaries works out since we need a clear authority figure when it comes to working out solutions.
ReplyDelete