16 November 2006

Transformation

The storm is coming up from the south, and will visit us with wind and lashing rain. Mini-tornadoes lifted the roof of a skating rink and day-care center in Montgomery, Alabama. With luck, the earth between us will scrub some of the energy from the clouds before it arrives.

Certainly the energy here is being focused in interesting ways. The Congress has only passed two of the eleven Appropriations bills to that fund government operations, and they are not going to get on it this week. They will finish their reorganization for the 110th Congress that meets in January, and then return home for two weeks over Thanksgiving.

Honestly, I don’t blame them. This has been a stressful enough for all of us, and we didn’t even have to campaign. It is a lot of work to transform the body politic from one thing to another.

The Senate has been re-invented. Things were easy for them, since they exchanged leadership in that body in 2001, by exactly the same margin, and are following the same template they did then. Most of the Committees will have an eleven-to-ten ration, Democrats to Republicans.

The new Majority Leader is Harry Reid, D-NV, and he has distributed the choice assignments based on seniority and loyalty. Incoming Appropriations Chairman is Robert Byrd, D-WV, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island will regain his seat on that most important panel.

I like Jack. He was a Special Forces soldier, and I had the chance to travel with him to Haiti when he was still a Congressman, and he was on the Intelligence Committee. I was responsible for dispatching a car to get him to the airport, and the driver got lost. He was quite cross with me, and I hope he has gotten over it, now that he is on Appropriations again.

I do not have much interest in farm supports, or milk prices, though there are those that do, and there was desperate maneuvering to get the right interests represented on the right committees.

My interest is concentrated on the national security side of things, just as a matter of self-interest and future contracting work. Senate Armed Services will have Carl Levin, D-MI, at the helm, replacing the venerable John Warner. He will stay on the Committee, as the ranking member, and he will be joined by the new junior Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb.

That makes him one of the most influential rookie members, and I expect we will be hearing a lot from him. I hope he makes sense.

I am following the assignment of another up-and-comer with some interest. Barak Obama secured a seat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, as well as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Joe Leiberman will take the Chairmanship of the latter, though he was elected ostensibly as an “Independent.” Also joining Homeland Security is Sen. Mary Landrieu, daughter of legendary New Orleans Mayor “Moon” Landrieu of Louisiana. She is there to ensure that she can continue to poke a stick at FEMA for its manifold failings in the aftermath of Katrina.

Returning from the wilderness on the Republican side is Trent Lott, who was banished by former Majority Leader Frist to the outermost limits after his ill-considered remarks at Centenarian Strom Thurmond’s birthday four years ago. He is back as the minority whip, beating out Lamar Alexander for a place in the leadership again.

They say the House will follow with announcements today. Speaker Presumptive Nancy Pelosi has been playing an interesting game with John Murtha and Steny Hoyer over who will be her number two in the leadership. She is demonstrating carrots-and-sticks right from the git-go, and that should cause some quivering over at the Pentagon.

Secretary Rumsfeld is still around, like Banquo’s ghost, and will stay until Bob Gates is confirmed behind him. It is clear that a lot of baggage is going to be cleaned out and left on the porch of the River Entrance to the Pentagon. Rumsfeld’s men were fierce in their protection of the Secretary’s prerogatives, right from the start of the first Administration.

I remember when that team showed up. They appeared to think they were parachuted into Indian Country, and they clearly did not trust any of us after eight years of drinking the Clinton Kool-Aid. I think they don’t trust us, and maybe they are right.

Dr. Steve Cambone was always the go-to guy for the Secretary. He reformed Acquisitions at the start, and eventually moved over to be installed in an all-new position, the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence.

There he attempted to put his arms around all the loose change that is spent by the Services, and ensure that all knew who the three-letter Combat Support Agencies (NSA, DIA, NGA) really worked for, intelligence re-organization be damned.

Dr. Cambone will not last the night, I fear. But power and turf issues aside, he will be able to walk out with his head high. The maneuverings that went with the establishment of his office, the quashed Mutiny of the Directors, and the huge expansion of the DoD intelligence capability will probably be neatly boxed by Mr. Gates, who as the Director of Central Intelligence, felt that Defense had gotten out of the box, off the reservation, and frankly out of control.

That is the thing about these Transformations that people try to impose on great bureaucracies. Are the changes permanent and enduring? Or will they have the life of may-flies, subsumed once more into the morass of the paper shuffling?

There is someone else we have not heard of in a while. His name was Douglas Feith, and probably still is. He was the Policy mandarin for the Secretary, and that is where the questions lie about the basis for the decisions that brought us to the unhappy circumstances. He had his own little intelligence unit, since he did not like the answers he got from the three-letter Agencies.

If I were him, I would make plans for a long vacation very far away, starting in January, when the new Committee Chairs start to draft the list of subpoenas for the hearings to come.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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