Rummy Gets the K?
Tim Noah, AKA Chowderhead at Slate, has an intriguing idea about the Kissinger appointment: That Henry the K will use it to get revenge on Donald Rumsfeld, with whom he's been feuding since the Ford Administration. All highly speculative, but interesting:
Kissinger will have the opportunity to assess the level of scrutiny the Pentagon gave during the first nine months of the Bush administration to a possible attack by al-Qaida. This theme has gone largely unexplored during the past year, while the screw-ups of the FBI and the CIA have been studied in some depth. It's not hard to imagine Kissinger deciding that Rumsfeld ought to have diverted some of the attention he lavished prior to 9/11 on missile defense (which would have been useless to defend the World Trade Center) and bureaucratic reform within the Pentagon (a dead letter since 9/11) to going after a terrorist organization that was well known to be bent on killing Americans.
Kissinger may be encouraged to follow this path by CIA director George Tenet, who for some time has been fighting a nasty turf war with the Pentagon.
To continue the Kremlinology a bit: It's inevitable that whoever decided on the Kissinger appointment was well aware of the enmity between him and Rumsfeld. So is this a clue that the Wolfie/Rummy faction has lost ground to the Powell faction (if reports that those factions even exist are accurate)?