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A Team of Bumblers?
Long but informative article in Politico. The final paragraphs:But what might be missing most from the administration—at least according to its critics—is a forceful strategist who is able to push the president (who remains, for the most part, his own No. 1 strategist) to be more decisive. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Rice feels somewhat snake-bit by her long and traumatic public trial over Benghazi, and the difficulties she has long had in her dealings with Capitol Hill. After her TV appearance on Benghazi, she sought to preserve her candidacy for secretary of state with a series of strikingly unsuccessful meetings on Capitol Hill in which she failed to impress even moderate Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. She also found herself facing resistance from foreign-policy elites who questioned her temperament and her record, including her past close relations with African dictators such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda. Of course, no one knows Obama's thinking on national security better than Rice, who has been with him longer than any senior official in the administration with the exception of McDonough, his chief of staff. And as we've discovered during six-plus years of studying Obama's M.O., that counts for a lot with this president. Keeping America out of any more disastrous wars is his mission, and it may well be that his allegedly bumbling team is doing nothing more than implementing his desires. Whether that is any longer a policy appropriate to the times, given the resilience of ISIL—and whether he's getting the kind of advice he needs to hear, rather than the kind he wants to hear—is another question, one for the pundits to debate. But as one former senior Pentagon official puts it, "When you select for personal loyalty, that may be all you get." Posted by: Pappy 2014-10-30 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=403098 |