Word: rumsfeld
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...McCain. "Let's get on with it." Fissures in the international coalition are becoming visible, with Europeans encountering more hostile public opinion. In Britain support for the war has slipped from 74% to 62% in two weeks. "The carping takes a toll," says an aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "especially if you don't have any Iwo Jimas to point to-and we don't have...
...quagmire as "soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot" and as "a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position." It has been part of the U.S. political lexicon ever since it seemed an apt description of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. In the last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has had to devote a considerable amount of his time to explaining why it's a misnomer for the current situation in Afghanistan. He was responding to the steady rumble from the media, politicians, Afghanistan experts and even some U.S. allies that the operation has the hallmarks of a classic...
...Still, the pundits' concern may be understandable. Last week, Rumsfeld told USA Today that the military could not be certain that Osama bin Laden would be captured or killed, but that the Taliban would certainly fall. (In a later corrective, he emphasized that the U.S. expects to get its man.) What was significant in those remarks was that toppling the Taliban appears to have become the primary goal and the snaring of bin Laden a bonus. And it has become clear after almost a month of bombing that the Taliban may be able to survive the current level...
...multitude of opposition groups. In Pakistan last week, Colin Powell seemed to get behind Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's proposal that a governing coalition would include Taliban "moderates"--members of the majority Pashtun tribe in the south who could be convinced, or bribed, to peel away from the regime. Rumsfeld signaled that the Pentagon no longer intends to eradicate Taliban forces wholesale. "It is going to be a lot easier to try to persuade a number of them to oppose the Taliban and to oppose al-Qaeda than it is to in fact defeat them." With winter coming and none...
...silence just compounded the concern about who knew what and who was in charge and where this all was heading. The anthrax incidents presented both a health threat and a crime scene, and the airwaves were dense with fear but short on facts. There was no domestic Don Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon briefings are reassuring even when they aren't especially revealing. Was the anthrax strain detected last week in the Congress "weapons grade" or not, easily spread or not, related to the other attacks or not? Are we ready or not? And when public officials offer answers like...