Word: rumsfeld
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Armed with the experience, the attitude and the requisite mandate from the president, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was going to be the guy who finally whipped the U.S. military into post-Cold War shape. But now, as his department scrambles to pull together a quadrennial review of Pentagon strategy and budgets before its Sept. 30 deadline, Rumsfeld is widely assumed to be losing the fight. The signs are grim: For a week, the New York Times and the Washington Post have peppered their front pages with stories on Rumsfeld?s fading luster; Slate suggests starting a "Rumsfeld Death Watch," predicting...
...Media speculation had it that Papa Bush and some of his advisers had weighed in gently at the height of the crisis, and if this is so it is to be welcomed - after all, the advice of Bush the Elder helps counter the hawkish instincts of Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld...
...palpable differences between Secretary of State Powell on the one hand and Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on the other are so openly acknowledged now that they're joked about in public by the protagonists. There is nothing unusual or necessarily counterproductive about an administration making its decision on the basis of input from both hawks and doves. But when such disputation is telegraphed to a wired world in real time, it can wreak havoc with U.S. diplomacy. Does the administration regard China as a "strategic competitor"? Depends who you ask. Does the U.S. condemn Israel's track...
...leadership and stressing cooperation with Beijing might well have caused something of a disconnect for many Americans more accustomed to hearing the Bush team describe China in more menacing tones. That may have been the political purpose of Secretary Powell's joint press conference in Australia with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the administration's arch China hawk. It looked like a self-conscious show of unity to signal conservative Republicans back home that making nice with China was administration policy, not just the Secretary of State...
...Rumsfeld, of course, still declined to refer to China as a "friend," preferring "communist dictatorship" instead. His differences with Powell are palpable, and yet they're always going to be settled by consensus. The balance may shift periodically, but within the limits defined by a long-term relationship in which both sides have an overriding self-interest...