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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (116642)	10/12/2003 3:48:39 PM
From: KyrosL	Respond to of 281500

Can't compare the Roman Empire to present day USA. The Roman conquests were self-funding, actually creating hefty profits for Rome -- that is until fighting off far removed barbarians started getting too expensive. In contrast, present day USA engagements (it's a huge stretch to call them conquests) are huge loss-making operations for the country -- though not for well connected insiders -- and cannot be sustained for long. Maybe we can sustain them for another presidential term, provided the strangers lending us the money continue being kind.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (116642)	10/12/2003 4:01:22 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Rice Fails to Repair Rifts, Officials Say Cabinet Rivalries Complicate Her Role _______________________________________________ National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has a strong bond with President Bush, but some fault her for not ensuring Bush's wishes are carried out. By Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, October 12, 2003; Page A01 washingtonpost.com Last week, the White House announced that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had been given the new responsibility of managing the struggling effort to rebuild Iraq. In the words of one official, Rice would "crack the whip, frankly." The announcement was met by puzzlement throughout the foreign policy community: Isn't that what the national security adviser is supposed to do in the first place? Rice has proved to be a poised and articulate defender of President Bush's policies. But her management of the National Security Council -- the principal coordinator and enforcer of presidential decision making -- has come under fire from former and current administration officials and a range of foreign policy experts. From the start, the administration has been riven by ideological disputes on foreign policy. But both neoconservative hawks and mainstream Republican foreign-policy realists say many of the administration's foreign policy headaches are directly related to the interagency process Rice oversees. A senior State Department official -- voicing an opinion that few in the government disputed -- said: "If you want a one-word description of the NSC since January 21, 2001: dysfunctional." Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. But Stephen E. Biegun, a former NSC executive secretary who left in January to become national security affairs adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), dismissed many of the complaints as "blame-shifting." "The State Department and Defense Department don't need Condi Rice to solve their problems," he said. "They are at the table to solve those problems." Henry A. Kissinger, former national security adviser and secretary of state, said, "In my experience, the losing side in an argument in the governmental process tends to blame the security adviser. The fact that all of them are complaining simultaneously is not a bad sign." This article is based on more than four dozen interviews, conducted over several months, with officials in senior positions at the State Department, the White House, the Defense Department and Congress, with former government officials and with foreign policy experts. Almost none would agree to be quoted by name, including former officials, because the national security adviser holds such a powerful position, and many expect to continue dealing with Rice after she leaves the administration. Even the White House would not authorize anyone to speak on the record about Rice's tenure. The 1947 legislation that established the NSC envisioned a body that would advise the president on the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies, and foster interagency cooperation. In practice, the national security adviser's impact has largely depended on personal chemistry with the president and the president's interests and desires. Bush is personally close to Rice. She spends countless hours at his side -- in the White House, at Camp David and on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. -- forging a bond that has transcended the statutory position of national security adviser. But the president also values dynamic debate among his foreign policy advisers, administration officials said. In Rice's case, she must try not only to manage two powerful Cabinet members with sharply different views -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- but also to deal with a player distinctive to the Bush administration: a vice president, Richard B. Cheney, who weighs in on every major foreign policy question. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, said those two factors have "greatly complicated the problems she faces" in trying to manage an unusually difficult set of foreign policy issues. Ivo Daalder, who for five years has run a Brookings Institution-University of Maryland study project on the NSC, said Rice is "closer to the president than any other national security adviser has ever been, including Kissinger to Nixon." But, at the same time, he said, "There's never been a time when the vice president has played such a dominant, powerful role inside the national security policymaking process." Daalder, who served on President Bill Clinton's NSC staff, viewed last week's announcement as evidence that Rice is trying "to take control of a process that was in some sense running away from her -- which was clear in the Iraqi reconstruction process, but also the foreign policy process writ large."