Robert Scheer: Richard Holbrooke wasn't all that

[Enrique]

"Speaking ill of the Best and the Brightest"

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/speaking_ill_of_the_best_and_the_brightest_20101221/

One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.

Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.

(...)

Holbrooke not only failed to learn from the U.S. mistakes in Vietnam; he repeated them in working for every Democratic president to follow. When Jimmy Carter was elected, there was Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of state supporting the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a group fighting the Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul.

(...)

From 2001 to 2008 Holbrooke teamed up again with Johnson to head Perseus LLC, a private equity firm. During that same period, Holbrooke became a director of AIG, the insurance company whose credit default swaps almost brought down the economy and which required a $170 billion bailout from the taxpayers.

In the New York Times obituary on the “brilliant” Mr. Holbrooke, only a single short paragraph out of 32 refers to his career in the now-troubled financial markets: “Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. … At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.”

The Times did not mention that Holbrooke left AIG, where he had been paid $268,000 a year plus stock options, two months before the insurer imploded. Further evidence that “the best and the brightest” had the same success with our banking system as they did in foreign policy.

[EFerrari]

1. This is going to be unrec'd into oblivion but he's right. n/t

[Vincardog]

2. So Holbrooke was responsible for giving Osama Bin Laudin Millions to fund his resistance movement.

[montanacowboy]

3. Absolutely right

he is right on

it's too bad some will not like hearing this, but the truth is the truth

[aquart]

4. I wondered when someone would get to this.

Not that I knew anything about the guy...but our foreign policy is frequently just nuts.

[former9thward]

5. Typical of him smearing the dead.

When they can't defend themselves.

[gratuitous]

6. Hard to "smear" someone using his own resume

But I suppose Holbrooke's alleged death bed statement about getting out of Afghanistan covers all sins. That is, if he was serious and not joking.