"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio tells Esquire. "What you've got is everything-and I mean everything-being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
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There is a policy apparatus, but there is no policy. The armature of the apparatus is composed of the shill horrors that inhabit the cabinet. I would characterize them as nasty, brutish, and cheap---but thankfully arrogant, narrow minded and inept.
There is no domestic policy, because if there were, it would imply that the vacuities that inhabit the armature understood that the actions of government were supposed to constituted a policy.
And this screaming black hole isn't restricted to the domestic front.
Look at foreign activities. The parts simply do not add up to a whole. There is no foreign policy. That's why none of the US actions make sense. War here, war there, threat here, threat there, lots of hot air speeches. These activities don't add up to oil, or imperial domination or geopolitical realignments or some other devious plan that nobody can figure out.
Nobody can figure out the plan because there is no plan. There is no plan because there is no conceptual basis for a plan. One would need to have, say a set of constructs that guide the articulation of a plan. But see, that's the problem: no construct, no plan, no plan, no policy. And of course no policy, no concerted sequence of actions, no goals to achieve, no goals, then no wins or losses, just nothing but ... whatever...
So much for the good news. Now the bad news. There has to be a war on Iraq, because there are no alternatives. The UN inspector mission has to fail, because if it succeeded, then that would imply, a positive US response of some sort. But a positive response would imply that there was originally a policy that had been foiled by Iraq and therefore the US had to go to war in order to effect its policy goals. But there was no plan, no policy. and therefore there was no reason to go to war. Since there was no reason to go to war, there is no reason not to. So there you have it, in a nutshell.
Time passes, next election, more of the same....
Chuck Grimes