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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (23307)	10/9/2003 10:44:22 AM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 93284

No More Secretary Nice Guy October 9, 2003 President Bush has been famous for avoiding public squabbles among his top officials, mindful of the fratricidal wars of his father's White House and the Clinton administration. Until now. Suddenly, everyone seems mad at everyone else, even though the administration tried to calm things down yesterday. Last week, the White House and the C.I.A. started pointing fingers over who had leaked an operative's name to a conservative columnist. Now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is upset with the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and he has shared his annoyance with the world. The State Department is gloating about Mr. Rumsfeld's being chastised for botching postwar Iraq. And the White House is trying to spin the mess any way it can. Mr. Rumsfeld's rebellion was touched off by David Sanger's report in The Times on Monday that the White House was reorganizing the control of postwar Iraq and Afghanistan under the wing of Ms. Rice. That did not sit well at the Pentagon. It saw the switch, correctly, as an attempt to suggest that the hawkish Mr. Rumsfeld was being edged aside in the face of criticism that Mr. Bush does not have an adequate plan for Iraq. Pentagon officials say there is less here than meets the eye. But Mr. Rumsfeld took the trouble in an interview, with newspapers in Europe no less, to make his disdain for the White House power grab quite clear. Mr. Rumsfeld said he had known nothing of the reorganization until he read news accounts. He dismissed Ms. Rice's memo describing the move as a restatement of the obvious, which is that the National Security Council is supposed to "coordinate" (translation: not run) this sort of thing. But White House officials say Mr. Rumsfeld did know about the change and bristled at his swipe at Ms. Rice. Well, Pentagon aides said in reply, Ms. Rice may have sent a memo. But she sends so many memos, how can a busy defense chief remember them all? Someone at the White House, they say, is lamely trying to mute criticism of postwar policy at Mr. Rumsfeld's expense. Secretary of State Colin Powell's team is delighted. While Mr. Rumsfeld has insisted on total control in Iraq, Mr. Powell's aides see the Rice memo as giving him more say. As entertaining as all this is to fans of Washington psychodramas, there are important decisions to be made about postwar Iraq and not a lot of reassurance so far that they are being made correctly. If Ms. Rice's memo signals a real attempt to exercise political control over the violence and instability in Iraq, that would be welcome. But so far, the grandly named Iraq Stabilization Group seems more like an attempt to substitute title-building for nation-building - reminiscent of this administration's announcement that it was dealing with unemployment by creating a new assistant secretary post at the Labor Department. nytimes.com CC

To: maceng2 who wrote (23307)	10/11/2003 8:07:43 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

OBL was only peed off at the USA because of the presence of fighter jets on Arabian soil. Oh, brother. If, for just a moment, I accept your ridiculous premise as true: Don't you think 9/11 was just a slight over-reaction? Couldn't Osama, a man from the powerful bin Laden family, which controls a huge amount of the Saudi economy and is the Saudi equivalent of the Rockefellers and Kennedys combined, have found a more civilized way to air his grievances? Why direct them at US, instead of THEM? Your premises are those of an apologist. As are your conclusions.