Decoding Rumsfeld’s Memo
In the NY Times.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a master of relentlessly upbeat progress reports on the Pentagon’s military gains against terrorism. So it was startling to see his real assessment in a memo circulated last week to top military officials, and then publicly released this week. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned whether America was “winning or losing the global war on terror” and asked whether an institution as big as the Pentagon was capable of changing itself fast enough to win. The results so far in shutting down Al Qaeda, he concluded, have only been “mixed.” Progress in hunting down top Taliban leaders, he noted, has also been relatively slow…
Mr. Rumsfeld’s big problem is that he seems to want to run almost every aspect of the war on terror but prefers to share the blame when things do not work out. Now he muses about forming a new institution that “seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies” on the problem of terrorism. He helpfully suggested that this new institution might be located within the Defense Department