Tom Ricks highlights the following part of George Packer's article on Afghanistan and Richard Holbrooke:
[Y]ou want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy's decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don't air their real differences a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross purposes, even actively undermining each other.
Ricks calls this "a pretty good summary of the Bush Administration's handling of Iraq, 2002-2006."
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