- Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on United
States President George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting
his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and
questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting.
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- Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon
advisers before the war; Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the
Pentagon's Office of Special Plans; and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter,
were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in
an article that could influence Tuesday's battle for control of Congress.
The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election.
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- "I think the influence will be on morale [among
Republicans]," said Steven Clemons, the head of the American Strategy
Programme at the New America Foundation. "I think they are confusing
the right. What this is yielding is ambivalence, and people will stay at
home."
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- Perle, a member of the influential Defence Policy Board
that advised the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in the run-up to the
war, is as outspoken in denouncing the conduct of the war as he was once
bullish on the invasion. He blamed "dysfunction" in the Bush
administration for the present quagmire.
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- "The decisions did not get made that should have
been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were
argued out endlessly," Perle told Vanity Fair, according to early
excerpts of the article. "At the end of the day, you have to hold
the president responsible."
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- Asked if he would still have pushed for war knowing what
he knows now, Perle, a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, said:
"I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and
people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I probably would
have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing
that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists.'"
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- The Bush administration admits it was mistaken in believing
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but the president
and other top officials maintain that Iraq is better off as a result of
his removal.
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- An overwhelming majority of Americans, however, now believe
the war was not worth the cost in blood and resources. The public rethink
by top neocons comes at a time of rising violence, with the US death toll
climbing steadily towards 3 000 and the United Nations estimating
that many Iraqis may be being killed by the conflict each month.
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- Kenneth Adelman, another Reagan-era hawk who sat on the
Defence Policy Board until last year, drew attention with a 2002 commentary
in the Washington Post predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk".
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- He now says he hugely overestimated the abilities of
the Bush team. "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most
competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,"
Adelman said.
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- "They turned out to be among the most incompetent
teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have
enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
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- He too takes back his public urging for military action,
in light of the administration's performance. "I guess that's what
I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you
know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked 'can't do'. And
that's very different from 'let's go'."
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- Adelman, a senior Reagan adviser at Cold War summits
with Mikhail Gorbachev, expressed particular disappointment in Rumsfeld,
whom he described as a particular friend. "I'm crushed by his performance,"
he said. "Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that
he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled
me."
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- Adelman said the guiding principle behind neoconservatism,
"the idea of using our power for moral good in the world", has
been killed off for a generation at least. After Iraq, he told Vanity
Fair, "it's not going to sell".
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- Michael Rubin, who worked on the staff of the Pentagon's
office of special plans and the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad,
accused Bush of betraying Iraqi reformers.
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- The president's actions, Rubin said, have been "not
much different from what his father did on February 15 1991, when he called
the Iraqi people to rise up and then had second thoughts and didn't do
anything once they did".
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- Frum, who as a White House speechwriter helped coin the
phrase "axis of evil" in 2002, said failure in Iraq might be
inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone
who cooperates, and the US and its friends have failed to prove that it
can protect them". The blame, Frum said, lies with "failure at
the centre", beginning with the president. -- Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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