How Government Looks at Pundits

An Op-ed piece by Eliot A. Cohen in today's Wall Street Journal. An insightful description of how foreign policy is made within the US government.

"Government resembles nothing so much as the party game of telephone, in which stories relayed at second, third or fourth hand become increasingly garbled as they crisscross other stories of a similar kind ('That may be what the Russian national security adviser said to the undersecretary for political affairs on Wednesday, but it's not how the Turkish foreign minister described the Syrian view to our ambassador to NATO on Thursday.') Add to this the effects of secrecy induced by security concerns, as well as by the natural desire to play one's cards close to one's vest, and the result is a well-nigh impenetrable murk of policy making."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123267054604308313.html