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10/6/2003

Rice will manage Iraq's 'new phase'

By Judy Keen, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Bush is giving his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the authority to manage postwar Iraq and the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-10-06-rice-iraq_x.htm

Look at this- this is from the first entry and is dated from December 2005:

President George W. Bush on Wednesday announced that the State Department would lead all US post-conflict reconstruction, a move that supersedes the controversial decision to give that task to the Pentagon in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

...but look at the other entries here, they're all dated from 2003 and say the same thing:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Bush+puts+Rice+in+charge+of+reconstruction&btnG=Google+Search

She already had authority, Bush waited 2 years to make it official.

Bush shafted Rumsfeld. Thanks Juiceman!

Rumsfeld found out he was replaced by the State Department, when he read it in a newspaper!

Liberals never understood what he was saying, and preferred to paint him as a Goebbels to Bush's Hitler. They lied. Or are fools. You don't force out the one guy who agrees with you- unless your hatred is so strong you really have no idea what is going on.

I also get asked if I really believe Rangel wanted to waste hundreds of thousands on a study of the military makeup, millions to reman draft boards, hundreds of millions to clothe, arm new troops and billions to send overseas more men. Read the next article, and weep: (By the way, Bush has made a terrible error, one of many, by saying he would send 20,000 new troops in. He should have let the Dems continue to argue for more troops so that over these two years people understood the Dems would want to escalate the crisis by throwing money and troops into the region. Now the issue is grey. I have had so many liberals write me and tell me a few hundred thousand troops more would end the civil war that I fear Bush is now re-inforcing this rubbish in people's minds. Rumsfeld wanted troops on ships to guard the area and off the ground, a smaller and sleeker military force to respond to terror, more reliance on corporations than government in National Security and if a civil war happened, at least it would keep the various factions away from us. I believe history will prove he was right.)

Rep. Charles Rangel has adopted Senator Kerry's "botched joke" about unsuccessful young people ending up in the military — only Mr. Rangel is not joking.

"If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq," Mr. Rangel, a Democrat representing Manhattan and Queens, said on "Fox News Sunday."

"If there's anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment," the congressman said.

Mr. Rangel was responding to a question about a study by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which found that those enlisting in the military tend to be better educated than the general public and that military recruiting seems to be more successful in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods than in poor ones.

"He's really, indirectly, insulting the troops," the study's author, Timothy Kane, told The New York Sun. "He doesn't want to admit the fact that thousands and tens of thousands of young men and women are willing to make these sacrifices. More and more troops are saying duty and honor are motivating them, not college money."

Mr. Kane, a former Air Force intelligence officer, said his study found that 97% of military enlistees were high school graduates, as compared with about 80% of Americans in general, and that the average reading level of military personnel is a full grade level higher than that of the general populace.

Mr. Kane acknowledged that in 2005 the Army, which was falling short of recruitment goals, began accepting more high school dropouts and more recruits with lower scores on intelligence tests. "It's not a huge surge," he said, noting that the increase amounted to a few percent at most.

Mr. Rangel is a long-standing advocate of reinstating the draft, but Mr. Kane said conscription would wreak havoc by drawing more undereducated and unintelligent people into the force. "A draft would almost certainly be a disaster," the analyst said.

Mr. Rangel has said that his draft proposal has little chance of becoming law. However, he rejected the Heritage findings and insisted yesterday that a formal Congressional examination of the military's demographics will prove him right.

"Once we are able to get hearings on this, everyone will see what they already know, and that is that those who have the least opportunities at this age find themselves in the military, as I did when I was 18 years old," the congressman said. http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=44138

People have asked why I am so concerned about the spy poisining case - I have a feeling we should start checking Russian planes that arrive here as the UK is. My fear? They have been using the planes to transport and sell nuclear materials! FOR YEARS NOW.