Word: rumsfeld
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...Robert Gates joins the Bush cabinet as the replacement for outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he can be expected to urge President Bush to talk to the leaders of Iran - an option Bush has thus far avoided. Gates made his own views on Iran policy known in mid-2004, when he joined Zbigniew Brzezinski - President Carter's National Security Advisor - in chairing a task force of scholars who issued a report titled "Iran: Time for a New Approach...
...Finally, unlike the Rumsfeld Pentagon, the Gates Pentagon will deal in fact. Gates knows good intelligence from bad. Think tanks, intelligence contractors and data miners might want to start looking for other clients. Still, one of the accusations that will be leveled at Gates is that he exaggerated the Soviet threat during the Reagan Administration. He cooked the books so Reagan could justify a bigger defense budget, or so it is said. This will be a hard one to prove. Soviet assessments were always an imprecise art. Anyhow, it was the entire CIA that missed the collapse of the Soviet...
...Rumsfeld was an ogre for the anti-war movement in the West, in Iraq he was never anything like a bogeyman. Only a few Western-educated politicians really understand the role of a U.S. Secretary of Defense, and what power it commands. Rumsfeld's persona - that dismissive arrogance that so infuriated his critics at home - was usually lost in translation on Arabic-language...
...most Iraqis, this is Bush's war, and Rumsfeld is just some guy who implemented the President's ideas. In three and a half years here, I have seldom heard Rumsfeld's name mentioned in conversations with Iraqis, whether politicians or ordinary folks. Even insurgent leaders rarely invoke his name: Rumsfeld is occasionally named in their statements and videos, but never in conversation. (Condi Rice, perhaps because she is a woman, comes up more often.) In a society long used to dictatorship, the notion that an American official other than President Bush can wield considerable power simply doesn't compute...
...There is more interest, however, in the results of the midterm elections. On Thursday, Iraqi TV stations extensively reported the Democrats' victories in the House and Senate, but scarcely mentioned Rumsfeld. Among Iraqis in the Green Zone - which is to say the political "sophisticates" - Rumsfeld's departure, taken together with the Democrats' capture of the House and Senate, can mean only one thing: a quicker withdrawal of U.S. troops...