From the AP story ‘White House considers war overseer‘:
“The White House is looking into creating a higher profile position that would have the single, full time focus on implementing and executing the recently completed strategic reviews for both Iraq and Afghanistan,” Johndroe said.
Translation…“The White House is looking into somehow circumventing the information dissemination process in place today, to hopefully reduce the negative impact that non-Rumsfeld-tainted Pentagon reviews are increasingly having, and to ultimately minimize the amount of added stress being felt by our increasingly weary corps of propaganda catapult operators.”
Indegent A-hole has coverage on this as well:
http://indigentahole.blogspot.com/2007/04/bush-seeks-to-outsource-his-job.html
I’m sorry. I thought that between the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, this implementation and execution thing was pretty well covered? So someone isn’t doing their job, but rather than fire them, I’m going to create an assistant to the assistants to oversee the overseers. That’ll do it.
As if the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are due to execution and not conception. As if this new guy will somehow be immune to the callous incompetence that is the unifying trait of this Executive.
Only one thing’s for certain: it’s a paid position on our dime.
The mainstream press and babble corps is focusing on this as if the President wants to lighten his load, but I’m much more cynical about it. Once Rumsfeld left, suddenly there were these reports coming out of the Pentagon with startling truth concerning the war, the readiness of our military, etc.
Creating a stop-gap for this information within the administration is essential to Bush at this point, and without a “military” person to contradict what the Pentagon puts out, the task of reducing its impact over time is diminished. Stephen Hadley certainly can’t do it. Doug Feith had his balls cut off I assume. Cheney isn’t enlightening anyone.
Credibility is at the point here where General Petreas (sp?) holds all that is left, and his was suspect to begin with.
I’m sticking to my guns on this one and resisting the urge to get into the ‘he needs a chief to command…’ trap. This is about information, and limiting the impact of Gates and truth as they combine to the chagrin of you know who.