Word: pentagonal
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...Vice President. Paul Wolfowitz meets both tests, and the job is a good landing place for him if he leaves Defense, since it does not require Senate confirmation. Also in the running is I. LEWIS (Scooter) LIBBY, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and another Pentagon veteran. The dark-horse candidate is ROBERT BLACKWILL, a hard-nosed dealmaker who has quietly handled Iraqi policy in the past year as a Rice deputy...
...Pentagon insiders expect DONALD RUMSFELD to try to hang on for at least another year. His chances of staying are helped, ironically, by the lack of confirmable alternatives. Deputy Secretary PAUL WOLFOWITZ has been widely criticized for predicting that U.S. troops would be welcomed in Iraq as liberators, and he would have a hard time winning Senate confirmation. CONDOLEEZZA RICE, who is believed to prefer the Pentagon job to Secretary of State, is a more likely choice--unless, as some speculate, she wants a breather from government...
...Even Pentagon officials privately concede that the U.S. is just muddling along. The unanticipated vicissitudes of the warfare have so far allowed for only short-term tactical decisions, and an endgame by definition is constantly evolving. Now the military is probing and testing fresh options for quelling violence: "Do we negotiate in Ramadi while bombing Fallujah," asks a senior official, "or vice versa...
...troops could be pondering questions like that for years. The Pentagon is planning to maintain in Iraq a force of the current size--138,000--for the next two years. And the top brass will probably boost the numbers to almost 160,000 for the next three months to bolster security for Iraq's elections. The Army's top officer conceded last week that the current 12-month tours in Iraq cannot be scaled back to six or nine months, as the White House wanted. The long deployments are pinching recruitment and retention, especially as veterans contemplate returning to Iraq...
...President continue on the abrasive, unilateral path of his first term, or will he seek, as he implied to Kofi Annan, a more ameliorative approach now that he has been re-elected. A key may be the fate of Donald Rumsfeld. He wants to stay on at the Pentagon, but the President may decide that a fresh start requires the sacking of the man who presided over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the no-bid Halliburton contracts and the post-Saddam planning disaster. The "legacy" Republicans believe it is an absolute necessity for Bush to replace his current foreign-policy team...