Word: screwup
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...Partisanship can stall investigations as easily as it can generate them. After the Bush Administration incorrectly declared that Saddam Hussein had dangerous weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, Congress launched a three-phase investigation into the intelligence screwup. But Republicans accused Democrats of going on a politically motivated witch hunt, and Democrats said Republicans were complicit in a cover-up of Administration mishandling of intelligence. It took years to get through the first two phases of the investigation. By the time the third got under way, few were paying attention anymore...
...This was not a failure to collect intelligence, [but] a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had," Obama said on Tuesday after scolding U.S. officials over the case, which he called a "screwup that could have been disastrous." "I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable...
...This was a screwup that could have been disastrous," he said. "We dodged a bullet, but just barely." If it wasn't already clear, the President put the government on notice. It has failed once. It cannot afford to fail again...
...Kandahar screwup adds considerable pressure to Obama's decision about whether to double-down on a war he has called crucial to America's national security. The military wants a decision soon, but both the President and the Secretary of Defense are undecided - as they should be. Any decision about Afghanistan has to depend on whether the elections produce a plausible government - that is, one that includes Karzai's rivals, like Abdullah Abdullah and the excellent technocrat Ashraf Ghani, and removes from power allegedly corrupt elements, like Karzai's brother. And even then, the chance of success in Afghanistan...
...figure in the revival was the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman--and his libertarian ideological bent was certainly a factor. Friedman never believed markets were perfectly rational, but he thought they were more rational than governments. Friedman saw the Depression as the product of a Fed screwup--not a market disaster--and convinced himself and other economists (without much evidence) that speculators tended to stabilize markets rather than unbalance them...