Just a little bit of history repeating

Stephen Bury is the nom de plume of Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. I found a copy of the little known The Cobweb on Abebooks a while back and purchased it since I enjoy his books. The Cobweb reads like a novel written yesterday, not 10 years ago. It's a novel about the last war in Iraq, the intelligence people who have information of potential terrorists acts on US soil, and the people in politics who cobweb them into inaction. While the novel isn't brilliant, it is a fun read and is a fairly good analysis of how people with good information and intentions at the lower levels of the FBI and CIA couldn't stop, and likely still can't stop, terrorism.

Hennessey laughed ruefully. "Your problem with this Iraq thing is that you've got tangled up, unwittingly, with people who long ago decided it wasn't sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them--for the greater good, of course. This is currently the most common character flaw in the Washington establishment--attempts to be Machiavellian by people who lack the talent, the panache, to pull it off. So here you are, good old Clyde Banks, desperately trying to deal with this very real problem here on the ground, and it's as if you're in a nightmare where these fucking bush-league Machiavellis listen to what you're saying but don't really understand."

"That's pretty much what it feels like," Clyde said, frowning at his corned-beef hash and nodding his head.

"You and I know that something is going on in Forks County, and we would like to do something about it," Hennessey said, "but between the two of us are about ten thousand of these people who are too busy looking down their noses at us to actually grasp the problem and take action. You must know that taking action is looked down upon, Clyde. This is the postmodern era. When events come to a cusp, we're supposed to screw our courage to the sticking place and launch a reanalysis of the eleventh draft of the working document. Actually going out and doing stuff in the physical world is simply beyond the comprehension of these people. They're never going to do anything about the Iraqis in Forks. Never."

Politics is the definition of putting a good face on raw selfishness. An organisation will always fail when the personality, feelings or agenda of one or a few people are more important than the mission of the organisation.