Word: pentagonal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Robert Gates, who begins his confirmation hearing Tuesday as President Bush's choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is expected to have little trouble winning Senate approval. Even Democrats who have had issues with Gates in the past are anxious to begin course corrections in the Pentagon's troubled Iraq war strategy. And means the hearings will most likely be a far cry from the last ones Gates faced - when George Herbert Walker Bush picked Gates to be CIA director...
...Defense Intelligence Agency under Reagan routinely inflated Soviet threat assessments to bolster the Pentagon's case for a military buildup. But a debate had been long running within the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA) over whether the Russian military was ahead of the U.S. Many CIA analysts were convinced Moscow was actually lagging behind. Melvin Goodman, a former division chief in SOVA, testified at Gates's hearing that "Casey seized on every opportunity to exaggerate the Soviet threat... Gates's role in this activity was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence on all of these...
...senior fellow with the Center for International Policy, a foreign affairs think tank in Washington, says he was " shocked" when he learned of Gates's nomination to be defense chief. "He's a terrible micromanager and I just can't see him existing in that Pentagon structure." But Gates, 63, has won friends among both Republican and Democratic foreign policy gurus. "Bob Gates is a pragmatist and problem solver," says Richard Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador during the Clinton Administration...
...backward, in part because she knew the dysfunctional Bush foreign policy operation, tilted as it was so heavily along the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, would not permit, much less sustain, scrutiny. As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group's potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that...
...heels. Says a Baker confidant: "Everything that happened on Election Day made for extra work." It wasn't long before senior Administration officials were whispering that the diplomatic proposals coming out of Baker's shop would never fly. Realizing that with Gates moving to the Pentagon, the study group's report may have more impact than they had first thought, Democrats from all quarters began bombarding their allies on the panel with advice about how to stage an organized withdrawal and pressing for a precise drawdown timetable. Baker, who was in touch with the White House, resisted...