Quote

One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was Bureaucracy Does Its Thing by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

George Packer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Thing
Fighting
Johnson
President
Inevitably
War
Zone
Doe
Worked
Saigon
Littles
Green
Circulating
Little
Takes
Screwing
Book
Heard
Robert
Country
Understanding
Bureaucracy

More quotes by George Packer

Image
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
George Packer
Image
People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.
George Packer
Image
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
George Packer
Image
American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.
George Packer
Image
Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.
George Packer
Image
There's a great book about that, The Breaking Point by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.
George Packer
Image
I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.
George Packer
Image
Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
George Packer
Image
Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.
George Packer
Image
I am reading The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and Redeployment by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.
George Packer
Image
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
George Packer
Image
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
George Packer
Image
We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
George Packer
Image
I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we simply close the door and say you are beyond redemption.
George Packer
Image
This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.
George Packer
Image
We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
George Packer
Image
Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
George Packer
Image
Politics should seize the imagination.
George Packer
Image
I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
George Packer
Image
I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
George Packer