Word: rumsfeld
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...Rumsfeld is serious about remaking the U.S. military, his outmaneuvering of the CIA two years ago will offer a blueprint for how he might achieve the goal. In the mid-1990s, the agency upset G.O.P. boosters of a missile shield because it kept reporting that any nuclear threat, beyond Russia and China, was at least 15 years away. But Rumsfeld and his bipartisan panel concluded in July 1998 that Iran, Iraq and North Korea posed near term threats, and that they could hide their missile-building progress until shortly before launching an attack on the U.S. North Korea bolstered...
...Rumsfeld's report proved contagious. By 1999 the CIA had changed its tune and was echoing him. But the agency had to bend the rules to do it: no longer did a foe have to be capable of reaching the 48 contiguous states to be deemed a threat to the U.S.; Alaska and Hawaii were added, putting the territory to be defended far closer to North Korea. The CIA began assuming enemy missiles could be fired without years of testing. Most critically, it stopped predicting what was "most likely" to happen in favor of what "could" happen...
...Rumsfeld likes to quote a fellow Chicagoan on the efficacy of arms. "You get a lot more with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone," Al Capone used to say. Rumsfeld retools the gangster's words for the post-cold war world. "You can substitute 'ballistic missile' for the word gun--and put in the names of some regional Al Capones--and it is every bit as appropriate today," he says. But even if a missile shield works, critics fear it will destabilize current alliances and trigger arms buildups by America's enemies...
...award for the oldest skeleton in the closet goes to Donald Rumsfeld. A story in the Chicago Tribune has raised a ghost that Bush's nominee for secretary of defense probably wishes had stayed buried. The paper claims that during tapes from the Nixon administration, Rumsfeld, on his way to his first stint in the Pentagon under Gerald Ford, can be heard agreeing with some of Nixon's less politically correct assessments of minority groups...
...Prediction: Rumsfeld won't take too much heat over this; while it's certainly pleasant to imagine an underling taking Nixon to task for his paranoid rantings, it's not exactly realistic...