He was, looking back on it, a close friend, although we didn’t debate the state of our souls, something dorm room freshmen of all ages typically discuss. The subjects we chewed over were almost exclusively technical topics, or history, or the sprawling, self-serving institution that Dwight Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex. He worked at the Pentagon and I was a military analyst on Capitol Hill, and we both took a skeptical stance towards government bureaucracies, having seen them from the inside.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when everyone was disoriented and either fearing devastating new attacks or hysterically screaming for vengeance, he kept his head. He also correctly predicted that the war on terror would degenerate into folly, tragedy and war crimes, with a side order of corrupt contracting and bureaucratic empire-building.
