Help Wanted: War Czar
(CBS)
To people who live outside the Washington Beltway, the White House search for a "war czar" to coordinate strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan may seem like just another bureaucratic shuffle. In reality, it is a confession that in the fifth year of the war in Iraq, the Bush administration still has not figured out how to harness all the agencies of the U.S. government into a unified war effort.
Or, as Defense Secretary Gates put it, "one of the arguments that we hear frequently and frankly are very sympathetic with is that we and the State Department are about the only parts of the government that are at war."
The National Security Council and the job of National Security Adviser to the President, currently held by Stephen Hadley, was created decades ago for the express purpose of coordinating all of the different agencies that play a role in national security strategy. A search for a "war czar" is an admission by the Bush administration that the National Security Council has failed to do its job...
