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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2004-03-24

My SecDef Can Beat Up Your SecDef

But your SecState is really scary looking. . .

Of course, the dominant story today is the 9/11 commission hearings, which include this notable monologue:

"Honestly, I don't understand if we're attacked and attacked and attacked and attacked, why we continue to send the FBI over like the Khobar Towers was a crime scene or the East African embassy bombings was a crime scene. You said we had balance between military effort and diplomacy. And frankly, I've got to say, it seems to me it was very unbalanced in favor of diplomacy against military efforts....Madam Secretary, with great respect, after August of '98 you and I both know what we did. I think it's a straw man to say that we're going to have random bombing or indiscriminate bombing. That's not what we're proposing at all. I keep hearing the excuse we didn't have actionable intelligence. Well, what the hell does that say to al Qaeda? Basically, they knew -- beginning in 1993 it seems to me -- that there was going to be limited, if any, use of military and that they were relatively free to do whatever they wanted."
Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey

Others have started to more capably dismantle the dissembling of Albright, Cohen, et al. and make the case pretty forcefully that this current team did as much as it could. You keep hearing that the Clinton Admin "Had a Plan"--my guess is that this "plan" was little more than a pencil-written line on a yellow legal pad that says something to the effect of "Terrorism--bad."

Of course, what I find most striking is the contrasts, and the Fox website has a photo that pulls this together nicely. For your comparison: Albright/Cohen vs. Powell/Rumsfeld. I'll take P/R every day, and I suspect that a huge part of the nation feels the same way.
Posted by: Michael / 3/24/2004 12:09:00 AM

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