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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Win Smith who wrote (76853)2/23/2003 3:38:35 PM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
When did Rumsfeld get this great reputation as a brilliant strategic thinker on the international front?

He has one inside the Bush administration, if not with you, Win. Did you read Bush at War? We are currently following Rumsfeld's "forward leaning" strategy in the Middle East. It was Rumsfeld's advice to get more aggressive and extract ourselves from the crumbling containment policy by getting rid of the menace of Saddam Hussein.

On the public pronouncement side, he seems sort of maladroit, actually.

That's a matter for debate, clearly. I see both Rumsfeld and Cheney playing bad cops to Powell's good cop. What the more centrist critics like Ken Pollack (or tekboy) do not fully take into account imo is the sheer difficulty in getting movement to actually happen, considering we have a bunch of "allies" (I use the term loosely) who have decided not to worry about worst-case outcomes because they know that it will be Daddy US's job to handle the rough stuff.

If Dick Cheney hadn't been "hanging out in a loincloth with a dagger between his teeth" last summer (as one reporter put it), then I think we'd still be talking about another perfectly useless round of "smart sanctions" in the UN.

So can we at least assign the hawkish policy to its chief authors, Cheney and Rumsfeld?
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