...get more.
Posted on 04/26/2003 4:29:22 PM PDT by Pokey78
WASHINGTON
The swank cocktail party celebrating the fall of Baghdad was the hot ticket on Embassy Row.
The host was the Bush administration's vicar of foreign policy. The guests on Saturday, April 12, included Tony Brenton, acting head of the British Embassy, and dozens of ambassadors from the smaller countries that fashioned the fig leaf known as the coalition of the willing.
The ambassador of Eritrea was welcomed to the house on Kalorama Road, even as the French ambassador, who lives directly across the street in a grand chateau, was snubbed. The German ambassador is kaput, but the ambassador of the Netherlands mingled with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Gen. Richard Myers and Gen. Peter Pace of the Joint Chiefs. The winners were gaily lording it over the losers, sneering at the French.
Conspicuously absent was the nation's top diplomat. Asked if Colin Powell was invited, a State Department official replied, "No. People here didn't know about the party."
The host was Rummy, top gun of a muscle-bound foreign policy summed up by the comic Jon Stewart as, "You want a piece of this?"
Washington has a history of nasty rivalries, with competing camps. There were Aaron Burr people and Alexander Hamilton people; Lincoln people and McClellan people; Bobby people and Lyndon people.
Now, since Newt Gingrich aimed the MOAB of screeds at an already circumscribed Mr. Powell, the capital has been convulsed by the face-off between Defense and State.
There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board — Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman — and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney.
And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet.
The dueling secretaries made a show of having lunch Wednesday at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Mr. Armitage said Newt was "off his meds and out of therapy"; Mr. Baker called Mr. Gingrich "someone with no foreign policy or national security experience . . . who was in effect forced to resign" as House speaker; a Powell aide said it was "inconceivable that Newt could have made this extraordinary attack on his own" without running it past Rummy; and a Powell friend said the hard-liners had tormented the frustrated diplomat and made his life "hellish."
Newt, amateur historian, is part of Rummy's brain trust. The defense chief regularly forwards blathering Gingrich e-mail about military strategy to irritated Pentagon officials.
This clash is epochal because it's beyond ego. It's about whether America will lead by fear, aggression and force of arms or by diplomacy, moderation and example.
Rummy may merely be a front man for Dick Cheney, who tangled with Mr. Powell for being too cautious in the first Persian Gulf war, and scorned Mr. Powell's strategy of going to the U.N. before the second.
Karl Rove scolded Mr. Gingrich for overreaching; W. still dislikes Newt for leading the revolt against Poppy for breaking his tax pledge.
But the president has not spoken up for Mr. Powell, allowing his credibility to be undermined as he heads off to the Middle East to build the peace. And Mr. Bush has never reined in Rummy's rabid fedayeen.
W.'s gut leans toward the macho Cheney-Rummy idea that America is not bound by history, that the U.S. can help Israel and reshape the Arab world and the rest of the world and not care who is run over, or worry about what will happen if we don't get cooperation on terrorism, proliferation, AIDS, trading, or if people everywhere get up in the morning thinking about how to get back at us.
Nerviness, absolutism and smiting enemies are seductive. Nuance and ambivalence aren't.
The day before Rummy's party, senators were shown an organizational chart for remaking Iraq. Just below Jay Garner, who reports to Tommy Franks, was a line to Larry DiRita, who is a special assistant to the defense chief. Even the time on the chart was "1700," for 5 p.m.
Diplomacy in Washington now runs on military time.
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
Come on, you can handle it!
I'll give it a shot, After all, what a way to go.
I do not travel in journalistic circles. However, I cannot for the life of me, understand why Howell Raines still has his job.
I heard that the NYT's local daily circulation was down 50K by early April, and directly attributed to the inaccurate
and biased reporting on the war.
Magically, after the numbers started to come in, they made a decided and noticible switch in editorial policy.
Michael Savage used to savage the now reigning Sulzberger as completely inept. To keep Raines on must mean they are
hunkering down (a la CBS, CNN, etc.) to appeal to the "in" crowd of Dims, both dead and dying, and watering, nay,
washing away their reputation as "the paper of record".
Maureen, you oughta know....you've been seduced!
She really does think that everyone agrees with her.
You know, there are a couple of ways that Mo could take that.
Probably more than I want to know, too.
Quote:
the Times's new publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr ... was a sixties anti-war activist who famously declared that in a confrontation between an American and a North Vietnamese soldier he'd want to see the American get shot."
Unquote.
Stanley Kurtz (NRO on line, June 5, 2001)
NPR should start to do biographies of publishers in non-Western style governments. That would get Pinch's attenion.
...get more.
To take your comment just a little bit further, Dowd seems to write as though she is mimicking the precise conversations that she hears while making the rounds of the Manhattan "coffee and tea" party circuit.
As in, what Dowd writes is probably a reasonable facsimile of the precise memes discussed (and rabidly agreed upon, as there is no disention in the coffee and tea circuit) by the "popular people" at these near-daily soirees.
Today's theme/meme would thus be the rehashed old piece of propaganda known as "the Administration is divided" routine, in which the Bush Administration is portrayed as being at war with itself (typically via Powell on one side and Rumsfield on the other).
Naturally, these themes/memes are tossed aside like a bad wine whenever they prove to be "inconvenient" (again, refer back to the fact that there can be no dissention at coffee and tea parties, so no one will ever say that so and so was wrong...rather, the old words are simply forgotten, 1984-style).
So, if you are interested in what the coffee and tea circuit is saying, simply read Dowd's column.
So there, at least I came up with a positive use for her spiel besides wiping my dog's muddy paws with her pages.
I don't which is worse...Dowd's nauseating smug tone....or how predictable she's become.
Does she have a thick NY accent?
I vote for the former over the latter thank you very much!
LOL, great idea putting Jones picture on the thread! Love it!
No. She was born and raised in Washington, DC and graduated from Catholic Univ. there and worked for the Washington Star until it went belly-up. I suspect that she might still live there.
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