how government really works and get out of this notion of the blame game and saying it s all someone else s fault. you re listening to the commonwealth club of california radio program and our guest today is william eggers, author and commentator, who is discussing when government works and when it doesn t. . . in terms of iraq, we fell into a number of the traps that we talk about in the book. certainly, one of those traps was a syndrome. when the decision was made to go win and we were looking at reconstruction, what they feel to do was there are a lot of people in the state department and elsewhere who had a lot of knowledge and had been looking at this as part of a democracy in iraq project for many years and actually argue about all the things that could go wrong, all of the different problems and possibilities. a lot of these administration did not want to hear that. they did not want to hear contrary voices. they were shut out of the process. one guy named tom work
and looking benignly at me as i argued. i even thought there was a nod somewhere. when the opinion came out, it was 7-2, and he was one of the dissenters. i wrote a law review article about the issue of was addressing in the lawsuit, and essentially said don t take people for granted on this issue. justice stevens wrote a dissent that is a roadmap of how legislation and administrative actions ought to be taken to steer clear of some of the problems he saw in the federal statute i was defending. . . the style of each justice as you prepare. certainly the more of an advantage it is the more you know but i think there are many advocates to show up for the first time who ve never been to an argument before who do a wonderful job simply because they ve mastered their case and they have participated questions without knowing precisely what questions they might ask. she was not engaged in bona fide and lawful services, particularly in this case where the government told the jury
his initial speech here today. does that suggest that the republicans are generally happy with the president s plan in afghanistan? one. and two, is there a prediction that there will be success this year in the campaign? military campaign? . how do you see this debate to? i think there is every reason to be skeptical. i question everything, every statement, every position, every note of optimism about this war. i think all americans should. i think your partners around the world should. somehow, that the karzai government will create a standard security force that has enough space to break the momentum of the taliban, if that is brought to bear in a reasonable time frame, but the other big issue is whether it becomes another country. the real bad guys are in pakistan. that is the problem. what is pakistan prepared to do? the challenge for this president is that [unintelligible] they will argue a but articulating an exit strategy or some sort of timeline. i think the secr
adherence 7 cisco called the environmental deaf they were from a think tank out here in san francisco called the environmental economic fund. are there any economist in the room? you know what they say about economists. and they are really good with numbers, but they lack the personality to become engineers. [laughter] . most importantly, by the time my little brother came along, all our home town beach was free of dead fish. overcoming this syndrome is all about listening. if we think we know the answer, would close off all these avenues of exploration. let s go back a few years ago to something to all experience here. in the 1990 s, california had a problem. the economy was in a slump. in part it was because of high energy prices. governor wilson and the legislature had an idea. what if we replace public monopolies in the competitive market with the goal of innovation and cost savings? it was not a fundamentally crazy idea. the regulation was largely successful in the a