Word: pentagonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...counter the Taliban advances in the propaganda war, the Pentagon has reportedly launched a broad "psychological operations" campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan to take down insurgent-run web sites and the jam radio stations. The Afghan government, for its part, has opened a new $1.2 million media center with international support. Staffed by a team of Western-trained spin doctors, the facility includes a high-tech media monitoring wing and an outreach department tasked with building better working relations with journalists...
...business of radically overhauling American government. Between the Obama Administration and Congress, the assembly line for Big Ideas is running triple shifts, cranking out stimulus plans, bank-rescue plans, foreclosure-prevention plans, health-care-reform plans, alternative-energy plans, auto-industry-reorganization plans, climate-protection plans, Afghanistan-war plans, Pentagon-spending plans - and that's just the first 100 days...
There are other challenges. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has submitted a radically sane Pentagon budget, which eliminates some unneeded weapons systems - and is likely to be eviscerated by members of Congress from the districts where those systems are built. "We are absolutely going to stand with Gates on this one," said an Obama aide, implying that the President would veto a same-old defense budget...
...that the military was better equipped to deal with interrogating prisoners of war; the military, after all, had its own interrogation school. But, as the message came down, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, apparently aware of the potential political firestorm that would result, had grown nervous about the Pentagon's initial involvement...
That, in the past, has fueled the suspicion that has driven the Pentagon's budget - which in turn convinces China's hawks that Washington does indeed see Beijing as an enemy. The Gates budget can change that dynamic - if China now responds, and levels a bit more with the outside world about its military. Big anniversaries come and go, but moments like this arise only rarely. Is the Chinese leadership smart enough to seize...