Word: rumsfeldism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...image of this ill-fated president. She quickly realized she had no such luck. So, as the night approached, Dartboard prepared to jeer and mock the out-of-good-graces leader, as is customary. But as she braced herself to wince at mispronunciations, misnomers (Secretary of the State Rumsfeld?) and tragically ill-formed sentences (“This has been tough weeks in that country”) she actually gleaned something useful from the rhetorically-handicapped leader...
That's why the White House and Pentagon moved quickly to formulate the right response. President Bush spoke last Thursday with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), to discuss how to retaliate. According to a senior Administration official, Abizaid called for "a specific and overwhelming attack to restore justice." It would be accompanied by an information campaign that would spread the word "that this won't be tolerated," the senior official said. The decision by commanders in the field to respond with such force, he added, "obviously pleased" Bush. "He understands...
...that Cheney would chair the Principals Committee meetings--a key policymaking forum on foreign and security policy. Rice was given the assignment, although Cheney managed to place some associates of his, like Robert Joseph, an expert on nonproliferation, in important positions within the NSC. Rumsfeld, no friend of Bush's father, spent much of the first half of 2001 fighting (and seemingly losing) a battle with the uniformed military to rethink their priorities. So Rice was central to Bush's team. Granted, she had only had a scant two years' experience in government, but from the time of her childhood...
...Bush team was deeply split. By 2003 there were at least four different streams of thought among Administration officials. Some people, epitomized by Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to use U.S. power to sort out the arc of crisis in the Muslim world. There were those--Rumsfeld, usually supported by Cheney--whose purpose was less to change the world than to defend America's interests in it and who were willing to use force unilaterally and pre-emptively snuff out what they considered potential threats. The State Department, for its part, continued to press for multilateral solutions...
...Iraq policy. The process never got much traction. Both Defense and State had their planning operations on Iraq (looking at very different things in very different ways), and according to a participant, Pentagon officials regularly skipped meetings of Rice's group that was planning for a postwar Iraq. Rumsfeld, for one, has not always treated Rice with due deference. At a planning meeting on the war in Iraq and its aftermath, an organization chart was passed around at the top of which were the initials NSA. "What's NSA?" asked Rumsfeld. "That would be me," replied Rice. A senior Republican...