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Seems that industrial nations, despite the advances they have made in other respects, possess an aberrant streak making them commit blunders and goof-ups, with few parallels in the rest of the world. The US, to all appearances, has the streak running through government and business, but other countries also, such as the UK and France, are not exempt.

Immediately coming to mind are instances of grand larceny in which corporates and at least one of the big five audit firms got implicated in the US, and the tangled skein of chicanery and deceit based on which that country and the UK attacked Iraq and have got bogged down there ever since.

The mindless manner in which the French Government recently went about fixing the unemployment problem plunged the whole country into a state of rebellion for several weeks, forcing the Government to beat an ignominious retreat. In the UK, despite advance knowledge of impending release of more than a thousand foreign criminals from jails after serving out their sentences, no step was taken by the Government to have them deported and they were all allowed to vanish into the countryside.

The latest scandal in which the US is embroiled has to do with Mr Peter Goss, the CIA Chief, who had to resign abruptly within 18 months of his appointment with a great deal of build-up given by the President, George W. Bush, himself. The old timers in the Agency found him utterly clueless, and a dozen senior and respected operatives quit unable to stomach his bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour. As per allegations widely aired in the media, Mr Goss and his No.2 and crony, one Mr Foggo, showed undue favours to a contractor who was also their long-time poker buddy. Many will find it simply unthinkable that an intelligence chief, that too of a super-power, would compromise himself and the nation's security in this fashion.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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