The Missing Middle: Iraq Edition

I heard Brett Baer comment on Fox news last week that there's a shortage of mid-level leadership in Iraq. He basically just mentioned this as a problem that continues to plague us that we're working to correct with training.

Let's see -- could there be some reason for this?

How about hazarding a guess that there was mid-level leadership in Iraq? It just happened to have a different focus than what Westerners would expect -- say, that of spooning out children's eyeballs in front of their parents, feeding them and their parents into plastic shredders feet first and then gleefully dumping the whole bloody mess into mass graves.

Now where could they have gone? Beheadings and roadside bombs anyone?

Duh-oh! We now openly call them terrorists; but they always were. A fine day for gassing the Kurds, no?

The difference now is that we now have Al Jazeera camera crews on scene to "glorify" the carnage. What's interesting is that it's not clear that Saddam's former middle management are actually able to kill as many innocents as they used to. Even lefty humanitarian organizations seemed to have low estimates on the order of 10,000 "disappeared" each year in Saddam's Iraq. On the other hand, National Geographic reported last spring that an Iraqi organization says there could be millions of "disappeared".

Gee, it's funny you never seem to read that in the MSM, huh?

The other factor in play here is that totalitarianism of all sorts -- including the Mideast variety -- is just is not very fertile soil for the initiative required to foster productive mid-level management. I know, I know, "productive mid-level management" is considered ra^ther an oxymoron in our "Dilbert saturated" society.

But if you look at the productivity of the U.S. vs. the old USSR you will find in any objective analysis that mid and low level productive initiative, adaptability and creativity was (and remains of course) vastly superior in the U.S. -- that's how we buried them. Likewise, the Israeli's ability to "smoke" superior numbers of Arabs in their various wars hinged heavily on the same sort of inequality as the Israelis were typically outmatched in numeric terms.

So on top of the "duh-oh" there is just a long road to slog digging out of the "totalitarian deficit". Russia and the slow recovery in Eastern Europe are living proof of this -- though some are doing better than others.

Iraq is a long term investment commitment brought on by the failed policies of the past: