Greetings folks. I’m departing Doha in a few hours after having spent an interestin day at the Sheraton here watching the Sudan/Darfur peace agreement signing ceremony — as well as participating in a significant conference titled “Political Islam: Options and Priorities” sponsored by the Al Jazeera Center for Studies.
President Obama’s closest handlers — Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs — are under fire from a number of observers, including this one, for deploying the President’s political capital badly, failing to animate and empower the considerable policy and political talent they have appointed to key positions on their team, poorly sequencing…
This is a guest note by Stephen M. Walt. The essay, which TWN encouraged Walt to publish after outlines of it appeared in private correspondence, first appeared on Walt’s Foreign Policy blog. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
This morning in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank challenges Edward Luce, Leslie Gelb, Jane Hamsher and me on our recent pieces explicating the management and policymaking mess among Barack Obama’s core team. (Here is my piece.) Let’s set aside for another post the fact that Milbank’s column seems to channel Rahm directly.
For a five minute clip selected by the New York Times for posting of a bloggingheads exchange I did with David Frum on Iran stuff, click here.
Before I get too far into this post, while I don’t believe that Rahm Emanuel is serving the Obama White House well as Chief of Staff, I do think he’s brilliant and would excel in other roles for the team — but that is not the purpose of this post.
I visited Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation Director John Taylor’s interesting blog, The New Nixon, this morning to see what he had posted on General Alexander Haig, whom Taylor knew very well.
(photo credit: Bo Elkjaer, Denmark) TWN reader Bo Elkjaer, based in Copenhagen but also a recent visitor to Washington, submitted this for TWN‘s “View from Your Window” feature (borrowed with respect and permission from Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish). Bo Elkjaer writes that this shot was taken at the intersection of Alhambravej and H.C….
Gates to Petraeus: IRAQI FREEDOM to become NEW DAWN National Security high tech intel expert Christopher Tucker, who probably will run the CIA one day, sent me this bit of interesting news. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has agreed to General David Petraeus’ request to change “Operation IRAQI FREEDOM” to “Operation NEW DAWN.
One of General Anthony Zinni’s more tough criticisms of the Obama administration this past year was that it had not placed a high enough priority on issuing its “National Security Strategy” report. The National Security Act requires the President to issue such a report within 150 days of the start of his or her administration….
