Word: pentagonal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wednesday the Iraq War finally landed squarely at the feet of the U.S. military. At a Senate Armed Services hearing, Gen. John Abizaid, the Arab-American who heads the Pentagon's regional military command with responsibility for Iraq and Afghanistan, had his professional judgment and even his honesty sharply questioned. Abizaid, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, had long been held up as the Army's most sophisticated expert on the Middle East...
...While unnamed Pentagon sources and outsiders have speculated that senior Marine commanders knew - or should have known - exactly what the Marines did on the ground that day, military sources now say that both Marine two-star generals in Iraq at the time will likely be cleared of any serious criminal wrongdoing...
...heady days after the first Gulf War, Robert Gates liked to tell a story about his boss, George Herbert Walker Bush. As Bush 41 was preparing to invade Kuwait in 1990 and free that nation from the clutches of Saddam Hussein, Pentagon generals came up with what they thought was a clever scheme that might prevent the President from going to war. Gates was in the Oval Office when the generals brought in maps, charts and pointers and told Bush that Kuwait could be liberated only if he was willing to spend six months deploying half a million troops halfway...
...looking for a new director of national intelligence. As a former CIA director, Gates found the offer tempting but declined after he decided that the job amounted to little more than overseeing a vast bureaucracy rather than running a real intelligence operation. Bush didn't offer the Pentagon job to Gates until early last week. A little cloak-and-dagger was used to sneak Gates onto the President's ranch for his job interview: he was instructed to meet White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and his deputy, Joe Hagin, at a supermarket parking lot in nearby McGregor, Texas...
Having worked at the White House and run the CIA, Gates will manage the budgets, bureaucrats, jargon and generals on the Pentagon's E-Ring easily enough. But he will be judged by only one rule: whether he can organize what a Baker aide calls "the orderly transition and exit from Iraq." Someone who has worked with him describes Gates as "serious, subtle, reflective, never curt or abrupt." Departing CIA directors are flooded with offers of corporate jobs and strategic intelligence posts. Instead, when Gates left government in early 1993, he fled to Washington State, where he spent the next...