..a New Age of Pragmatism in Washington.???

[rodeodance]

More like saving Butts!



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17554602/site/newsweek/page/2/

........That was the "final straw" for Gates, says the senior Bush aide, who did not want to be named characterizing Gates's personal views. (Gates himself declined NEWSWEEK's interview request.) The next day, at a National Security Council meeting at the White House, Gates quietly pulled the president aside and told him he was firing Harvey, the aide says. Gates summoned Harvey, who was visiting the Army's infantry command at Fort Benning, Ga., back to the Pentagon. At a short meeting in the Defense secretary's third-floor office, Gates told Harvey that the Army secretary had not grasped what the Defense secretary had meant about accountability. At a news conference an hour later, Gates said, "Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems."


A Defense secretary who admits that his top officials have been too defensive? It was such a refreshing idea that some in the punditocracy were ready to declare a New Age of Pragmatism in Washington. Gates's candor about high-level blundering did seem illustrative of something different stirring in the inner councils of the Bush presidency. During the past several weeks, the administration has reversed course on two major foreign-policy fronts. After years of refusing to cut a deal with North Korea, the administration offered Pyongyang fuel and food in exchange for promises to slow down its nuclear program. And after insisting that the United States would not sit down with Iran until the mullahs gave up their push to build a nuclear bomb, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that American representatives would be attending a conference between Iraq and Iran to talk about security issues.

When Rice went public with these diplomatic initiatives, Vice President Dick Cheney was not even in the country. Cheney was in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the time, dodging terrorists who set off a bomb outside Baghram Air Force Base while the vice president was "inside the wire." Suffering from blood clots, and with his valued deputy I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby convicted of perjury, Cheney seems to be drifting into the shadows, no longer the man behind the throne.

Rumsfeld gone, Cheney marginalized. Has President Bush himself gone soft, become a touchy-feely multilateralist? The answer is no—at least not yet, and probably never. White House officials (speaking anonymously about sensitive national-security-policy questions) insisted to NEWSWEEK that Iran's mullahs have been shaken and made more pliable by the administration's show of force in the region—capturing Iranian operatives in Iraq, sending two aircraft carriers steaming toward the Persian Gulf. (Gates was all for this saber-rattling, say his aides, who wouldn't be named for the same reason.) Bush is not about to suddenly reverse himself and embrace the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission (of which Gates was a member) that call for a troop drawdown in Iraq and an all-encompassing international peace conference on the Middle East. What has changed so far in Bush's administration is more a matter of style than substance—though new ways of doing business can sometimes produce tangible differences in outcomes............