Per Jimbo's last:You can't really make the additional level of friction arguement when the current alternative is chaos.
New York Times
April 12, 2007

News Analysis

4 Years On, The Gap Between Iraq Policy And Practice Is Wide

By David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Four years after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is once again struggling to solve an old problem: Who is in charge of carrying out policy in Iraq?

Once again President Bush and his top aides are searching for a high-level coordinator capable of cutting through military, political and reconstruction strategies that have never operated in sync, in Washington or in Baghdad.

Once again Mr. Bush is publicly declaring that his administration has settled on a strategy for victory — this time, a troop increase that is supposed to open political space for Sunnis and Shiites to live and govern together — even while his top aides acknowledge that the White House has never gotten the execution right.

“We’re trying to learn from our experience,” Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in an interview on Wednesday. Confirming a report that first appeared in The Washington Post, Mr. Hadley said he had been sounding out retired military commanders to assess their interest in a job where they would report directly to President Bush.

“One of the things that we’ve heard from Republicans and Democrats is that we need to go a step further in Washington and have a single point of focus, someone who can work 24/7 on the Washington end of executing the strategy we’ve put in place for the next 22 months,” to the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

Mr. Hadley came to his job in the beginning of 2005, after four years as deputy national security adviser, and said from the outset that the Achilles’ heel of the administration had been its failure to execute its policies.

Now, Mr. Hadley said, he had decided that “while we’ve had plans and due dates and stoplight charts, what we need is someone with a lot of stature within the government who can make things happen.” That official, Mr. Hadley said, would deal daily with the new American ambassador in Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and the new commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and then “call any cabinet secretary and get problems resolved, fast.”
Given all that, Jimbo's comment on chaos suggests we have been discussing draining the swamp while the alligators feast on his ass. I think I understand Jimbo's frustration much better after reading this piece in which the Nat Sec Advisor seemed to repeatedly admit difficulty in learning.

Tom