Word: riedel
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...Bruce Riedel...
Gates has gone out of his way to woo Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so much so that they've come to seem inseparable. "Gates needs her," says Bruce Riedel, who led Obama's strategic review of Afghanistan early last year. "No one would take Gates' view on what the Democratic Party would support in Afghanistan seriously. He's not a Democrat...
...Obama is trying to make a virtue of necessity. Since the U.S. can't defeat all terrorism-supporting movements and regimes, he's arguing that it doesn't have to, since most of them are not committing terrorism against us. As Bruce Riedel, who ran Obama's initial Afghanistan and Pakistan review, puts it, "He's going after the organization that attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and before and since rather than pursuing a vague and murky war on terrorism everywhere." Team Obama has junked the phrase war on terror, not to mention Islamofascism. And the World...
...Riedel warned that if the presidential election isn't seen as legitimate, it could lead to the collapse of the central Afghan government. "If the government of Afghanistan now goes into free fall - something like the South Vietnamese governments of the 1960s - then all the troops in the world really aren't going to matter," Riedel said. "If we don't have a government we can point to that has some basis of legitimacy in the country, the best generals, the best strategy, isn't going to help turn it around...
...Both Riedel and Anthony Cordesman, a military expert who has been advising McChrystal, mentioned Vietnam in their remarks to an audience at the Brookings Institution last week. That's a ghost that strikes fear into the heart of many Democrats, who fear Obama may be treading down the same path in Afghanistan that President Johnson followed to political ruin - for him and his party - in Vietnam. "What I found, being in Afghanistan, was all too familiar of problems not only in Iraq but in Vietnam years ago," Cordesman said. "We take the insurgency, and we define it in terms...