On Being Eclectic

Recently I wrote the following in an earlier blog posting:

With the ITscout Blog, my emphasis has primarily revolved around addressing two key questions:

1. What is IT Architecture?
2. Why is IT Architecture important?

In truth, although IT Architecture is the primary theme around which my professional career currently revolves, the ITscout Blog is indeed a personal web site and not a corporate web site. The views I express are clearly my own, mine alone, and not necessarily those of the company I work for, nor the people I work with. While IT Architecture is extremely important to me, I prefer to use my blog to report on a wide range of eclectic topics -- things I find personally interesting. I suppose I could maintain separate blogs -- one for work-related topics and another for everything else -- but I prefer not to (at least not yet).

Given this long-winded preface, it'll come as no surprise that this current posting has nothing to do with IT Architecture. But, I'd like to share some connected dots I had never seen connected before.

Everyone by now has heard of Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame had her identity as a CIA agent leaked to the press (i.e., Bob Novack) by someone inside the White House (most probably by Carl Rove). What I hadn't realized, until today, is that back in January 1991, that same Joe Wilson was George H. W. Bush's (i.e., #41's) acting ambassador to Iraq, living in Baghdah during the runup to the first Gulf War. I learned of this from Boston Globe editorial columnist H.D.S. Greenway, whose op-ed piece, entitled "The Atypical Ambassador", is excerpted below:

We now know how men like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought into a utopian grand design and took a deeply inexperienced young president along with them.

And we know now what a deep and damaging failure this botched dip into idealistic colonialism has been, and how it has hurt our cause of trying to combat Islamic extremism.

I left here with Joe Wilson nearly 15 years ago, but because the son lacked the wisdom of the father, I am back in this demeaned and bitter city witnessing the greatest foreign debacle of a lifetime.

A day earlier, The Boston Globe ran a scathing editorial written by James Carroll entitled "Deconstructing Cheney" which described "just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States" and how intertwined the Vice President's career has been with his close pal and constant sidekick Donald Rumsfeld. Most frightening is an accusation in this article stating how, on September 11th, "in Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call."