Critical times call for White House czar on WMD

"Then why hasn't Mr. Bush taken the relatively simple step of appointing a White House coordinator to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism?" Is Mr. Rennolds seeking that position? The article reads so.

"Then why hasn't Mr. Bush taken the relatively simple step of appointing a White House coordinator to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism?" Could it be that President Bush has only a little more than 5 months left in his administration and it would take at last twice as long just to BEGIN to organize that new office, let alone create the infrastructure necessary to coordinate between the various different other departments? Appointing someone is not the problem, actually creating that office from scratch is the problem. Creating a cabinet level position at such a late date in anyone's administration would be nothing but an exercise in futility.

Don't we have a new dept of homeland security? And we have the military and intelligence services too. Just what good is having a "czar" for WMD to sit around in the White House? I especially love this: "congressional mandate to appoint a czar to oversee, among other things, the lockdown of nuclear weapons and fissile materials worldwide." Only this Congress would presume that it could mandate such nonsense. I'm sure the Russians and Iranians are just itching for this new "Czar" to come in and do that in their country!

We have the DNI, CIA, DHS, NNPT, NRC, Defense Dept, and who knows how many other entities involved in nuclear intelligence. Surely, one of these organizations can be tasked with the job. Czar, as a concept, sounds good - rarely works. Mr. Rennolds challenge is nonetheless valid - are we doing all we should be doing in order to gain some control over the problem?

President Bush is a non factor at this point and we can only hope that he does nothing until he leaves for good for Crawford, where he seems to be most at home. I wish him well in his continued retirement.