The "Sesame Street Repugs" take over Bush's National Security Council!
(I hope there are some "Free to Be You and Me" and "Mr. Rogers" Dems who are willing to come in and help the next Dem Administration. ARE ANY OF YOU OUT THERE??)
By Dafna Linzer
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B03
They headed off to college as the Berlin Wall was coming down, were inspired by globalization and came of age with international terrorism. Freed from a constant nuclear standoff as a dominant fact of international life, members of Generation X no longer fear war or upheaval in the global status quo.
Understand them -- and where they came from -- and suddenly President Bush's Middle East forays, grand democratic experiments and go-it-alone strategies take on a different look.
That's because nearly a dozen thirtysomething aides, breastfed on "Sesame Street" and babysat by "The Brady Bunch," are now shaping those strategies in unexpected ways as senior advisers at the National Security Council, the White House's powerful inner chamber of foreign policy aides with routine access to Bush. This small group of conservative Gen Xers -- members of an age cohort once all but written off as stand-for-nothing underachievers -- is the first set of American policymakers truly at home in a unipolar world.
Their adulthood has never included a fellow superpower or the need to reach accommodation with an enemy -- a Cold War concept none of the NSC's Gen-X crowd can get their heads around. Instead, their history begins with Sept. 11, 2001. It is the measuring stick they use when discussing their generation's challenge and the sole lens through which they envision the future. "We all built careers in the post-Cold War world," said Meghan O'Sullivan, who at 36 is the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. "You have to think about what are the defining features of the age we live in. For me, that's American primacy, globalization, terrorism and WMD, which is why we do what we do. This wasn't applicable during the Cold War."
Growing up in a time of unprecedented wealth, they saw capitalism as inescapably tied both to freedom and democracy. In a world where everything seemed achievable, it was just a matter of setting the right priorities. They figured, at a young age, that Mideast oil was of great importance, that the really bad guys didn't come from Russia and that for all the nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the country could still be hurt, held hostage or prevented from striking back.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
