[thanksgiving]

> It could simply be bureaucratic imperative. 26 years of war in the Mideast has created a whole generation of policy wonks whose expertise is the Middle East; if we cease to be at war in the Middle East, then all of their jobs are on the chopping block and all of their expertise is useless; therefore, they have a very strong self-preservation incentive to recommend policies that continue the war in the Middle East.

I'm not saying everyone else's job is easy either but from an outsider's perspective I see the job at state department pretty challenging. Here's a quote from Condoleezza Rice's Wikipedia page:

> Following her confirmation as Secretary of State, Rice pioneered the policy of Transformational Diplomacy directed toward expanding the number of responsible democratic governments in the world and especially in the Greater Middle East. That policy faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with U.S. support.

I'm sure there is some self-preservation going on, maybe explicitly or maybe even without someone thinking about it consciously but the other part is how much wiggle room do we have? Can we have the tough talk of "We don't negotiate with terrorists" while working with democratically elected governments with organizations that the government consider terrorists?

I keep thinking about this machine learning class where they talked about how classification and decision-making has always been a difficult problem. I think at the end of the blame goes straight up to the top, which is us the voting (or non-voting) public. At the end of the day, we are responsible for what our elected officials do or do not do regardless of the advice from the policy wonks. It is scary because I know so precious little about anything and yet I am to weigh all matters from oil pipelines to tariffs when I vote.