Word: rumsfeldism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...Your mission is difficult," Rumsfeld told the 2,000 airmen and women in Missouri. "Our enemies live in caves and shadows." U.S. and British special-ops forces don't just face treacherous, mine-riddled terrain. They will have to confront wily, weathered adversaries in a place where it's often impossible to tell who's on your side. "These folks are pros. They're clever. They've been around a long time," says Rumsfeld. "They've probably changed sides three or four times, and may again." The Taliban has also shown an ability to withstand hits against strongholds and replenish...
...flying lazy circles over Afghanistan, hammering targets below at will. If the skies were safe for AC-130s, it followed that low-flying choppers could deliver commandos into enemy territory. Inside the Pentagon, military planners conceded that the air war was producing diminishing returns. And so Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began dishing out the rhetoric. On Monday he stressed that American forces should "develop relationships" with anti-Taliban forces on the ground. B-52s "are powerful and can do certain things within reasonable degrees of accuracy," noted Rumsfeld, "[but] they can't crawl around on the ground and find people...
...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...