WASHINGTON (AP) -- A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster.

Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

"I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,"' he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue.

Asked about the article, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."

Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration's conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised Bush. Adelman said he was "crushed" by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Adelman also said that neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world," has been discredited with the public. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell."

The critiques come as growing numbers of Republicans have criticized Bush's policies on Iraq. The war, unpopular with many Americans, has become a top-tier issue in next week's congressional elections.

Perle said "you have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security team.

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he said. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/03/iraq.critics.ap/index.html

A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.

- Richard Perle

The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much.'"

- Richard Perle

That's a pretty amazing turnaround, for a guy that once said this :
A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. - Richard Perle

Adelman also said that neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world," has been discredited with the public. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell."

Perle said "you have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

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 the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election.

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'."

Mr Adelman, a senior Reagan adviser at cold war summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, expressed particular disappointment in Mr Rumsfeld, who 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."

Mr Adelman said the guiding principle behind neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world", had been killed off for a generation at least. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell".

Michael Rubin, who worked on the staff of the Pentagon's office of special plans and the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad, accused Mr Bush of betraying Iraqi reformers.

The president's actions, Mr Rubin said, had 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".

Mr 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 United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them". The blame, Mr Frum said, lies with "failure at the centre", beginning with the president.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/s...1939472,00.html

Here are some of the top people in the neo-con movement, and they've turned into Brutus and his fellow assasins in the Roman Senate.
"Et Tu, Richard ?"

... 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'."

"The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."


Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."

Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "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."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. 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."

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

Even Nixon didn't get this type of attack from his previous friends.

Even Nixon didn't get this type of attack from his previous friends.

Could this be paraphrased as "Anyone up for 3 card monte?"

In other words, "The propaganda worked but the plan failed and now the jig is up."

Aside to fellow neo-cons:
"Even if we lose another round, just wait until the next generation is at the polls. They won't remember any of this, they're too young. If we play it right we can rewrite this to make it look like the American Renaissance and an opportunity missed. Who do we know that owns a textbook publishing company?"

There is a difference between doing it the right way and doing nothing.
Americans do make mistakes, one must queston the relevance of Canada
who does little if anything.

With this page I hope to educate and entertain people about the over 50,000 British North Americans (Canadians) who faught for the Union and over 10,000 for the Confederacy.

Canadian officials in Washington marked Canada Day by laying wreaths on the graves of home-grown heroes who won the top U.S. medal for bravery.

Ambassador Frank McKenna and military attaché Rear Admiral Ian Mack honoured nine Canadians buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the main U.S. military cemetery.

The nine were among the 61 Canadians who have won the Congressional Medal of Honor, more than half of them during the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) and only four since 1900.

"It's our national day. It's a day Canadians celebrate, but it's a day as well where we should honour our warriors who have been recognized by other countries by being awarded their highest medal for bravery," McKenna said.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2005/07/0...edal050701.html

Although the Patricias had maintained their positions, the battalion was surrounded and the supply route was controlled by the enemy. With ammunition reserves and emergency rations depleted, Lieutenant-Colonel Stone requested air supply. The parachute drop was made within hours of the request. By 2 p.m. the Middlesex Regiment had cleared enemy groups from the rear and the road to the PPCLI position was re-opened.

The Canadians in this action had maintained their position – vital to the brigade defence – while at the same time inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy. The relatively light casualties (10 killed and 23 wounded) which they, themselves, had sustained testified to the skill and organization with which the defence was carried out.For their gallant stand at Kapyong the 2nd Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and the 3rd Royal Australian Regiment received the United States Presidential Citation.

http://canadaonline.about.com/gi/dynamic...alour%2Fkapyong

"The worst of ours are going north, and the best of theirs are coming south."

- Unknown marine quoted in Leatherneck magazine

"Some estimate that their numbers far surpassed the more than 30,000 American draft dodgers who fled to Canada to avoid military service during the war. While exact numbers are impossible to obtain, from my work as a military historian with the Canadian War Museum, I estimate that of the many thousands who served in the U. S. Vietnam-era military, some 12,000 Canadians actually served in Vietnam itself."

- Fred Gaffen in "Perspectives", Vietnam magazine, August 1991

http://www.mystae.com/reflections/vietnam/canada.html

August 7, 2002; A Canadian sniper in Afghanistan has been confirmed as hitting an enemy soldier at a range of 2,310 meters, the longest recorded and confirmed sniper shot in history. The previous record of 2,250 meters was set by US Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam in 1967. The Canadian sniper was at an altitude of 8,500 feet and the target, across a valley, was at 9,000 feet. Canadian sniper units often operated in support of US infantry units, which were grateful for their help. The record lasted only one day, until a second Canadian sniper hit an enemy soldier at 2,400 meters. The Canadian snipers were firing special ..50-caliber McMillan tactical rifles, which are bolt-action weapons with five-round magazines. The Canadian snipers were the only Canadian troops operating without helmets or flak jackets as they had too much other equipment to carry. Each three-man team had one sniper rifle, three standard rifles (Canadian C7s), one of them with a 203mm grenade launcher.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that an important benchmark—a classified briefing chart prepared each month by the intelligence section of the U.S. Central Command—shows that Iraq is steadily edging closer to chaos. The chart, an "Index of Civil Conflict," measures the escalation in sectarian violence since last February and highlights the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi security forces and the waning influence of moderate Iraqi religious and political figures. It highlights a growing number of urban areas where ethnic cleansing is under way and reports that violence is at an all-time high and spreading geographically in Iraq. The civil strife index chart mirrors the growing concern among the military commanders most closely involved with the war in Iraq, and it's a warning that even worse news could be on the horizon.

Contrast that with President Bush's recent declarations that although Iraq is a tough situation, we're winning and victory and glory will be ours—or his—in the end. It's also clear that our uniformed military leaders are worried that, when push comes to shove, the administration's micromanagers will try to blame them for failing to achieve that victory with too few troops and too little freedom to change a failing course.

The most recent polls indicate that the number of Iraqis who want us out of there is approaching 70 percent. It may be ironic that the number of Americans who want us out of there, too, is nearing the same percentage. They want us to leave. We want us to leave. There's nothing standing in the way of satisfying both majorities except a president, a vice president and a defense secretary who are willing to fight to the last man—willing to drive our military to utter destruction—before they'll admit that they were wrong, wrong, wrong from deluded beginning to wretched end.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11..._iraq_burns.php

Former Reagan economist exposes the Bush administration's radical departure from fundamental conservative principles

And explains why it may cost the GOP the presidency and its congressional majority
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy
by Bruce Bartlett

George W. Bush is widely considered -- by liberals -- to be one of the most politically conservative presidents in history. But many on the right have a different perspective. Among the latter are Bruce Bartlett, a highly respected Republican economist and an alumnus of the Reagan White House, who in 2000 was an eager supporter of George W. Bush (and even helped to craft the President's early tax cuts) but has since become disillusioned by his big-spending, government-expanding ways. Now, in Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, Bartlett attacks the Bush administration's economic performance root and branch -- showing how Bush has made no effort to restrain the growth of government, greatly increased domestic spending, created a new entitlement program for prescription drugs, failed to veto a single bill, and expanded both the size and scope of government in many ways quite apart from national defense and homeland security. Bartlett also explains why the Bush policies will have serious economic consequences for the country - and possibly fatal political consequences for the GOP.

"I write as a Reaganite," explains Bartlett, "by which I mean someone who believes in the historic conservative philosophy of small government, federalism, free trade, and the Constitution as originally understood by the Founding Fathers. On that basis, Bush clearly is not a Reaganite or "small c" conservative. Philosophically, he has more in common with liberals, who see no limits to state power as long as it is used to advance what they think is right. In the same way, Bush has used government to puruse a 'conservative' agenda as he sees it. But that is something that runs totally contrary to the restraints and limits to power inherent in the very nature of traditional conservatism. It is inconceivable to traditional conservatives that there could ever be such a thing as 'big government conservatism,' a term often used to describe Bush's philosophy."

Highlights of Bruce Bartlett's penetrating critique

* Medicare expansion: Why the new "prescription drug benefit" may be the worst legislation in U.S. history, and will cost the nation vast sums it can't afford

* How the Medicare drug benefit will inevitably lead to higher taxes and price controls that will reduce the supply of new life-saving drugs

* Why the chief "beneficiaries" of the drug benefit will not be hard-pressed seniors, but big corporations

* Why the Bush tax cuts have accomplished relatively little economically. Why many of its provisions are the tax-equivalent of pork-barrel spending -- costing revenue while doing little or nothing to increase economic growth or improve the structure of the tax system

* Why Bush may ultimately be responsible for the largest tax increase in history, as the inevitable result of his policies -- though it may not come on his watch

* Why the inevitable tax increase will probably a European-style value-added tax (VAT)

* How the Administration's policies are developed with little analysis or forethought, then rammed through a compliant Congress -- leading to both economic and political mistakes that could have been avoided

* Why the Bush White House has the worst record on free trade since Herbert Hoover

* Why Clinton was actually better on the budget than Bush -- vetoing bills because they cost too much (Bush hasn't vetoed a single one) and significantly reducing overall government spending (Bush has massively increased it)

* The Regulatory President: how, after promising to roll back Clinton's regulatory excesses, Bush has sacrificed principle to politics and allowed regulation to flourish

* Why Bush's policies have far more in common with Nixon's than Reagan's -- especially in his failed attempts to woo moderates by enacting liberal programs (like Medicare expansion) that harmed the economy and GOP fortunes

* Why, thanks to the Bush economic policies, Republicans are likely to suffer significant losses in 2006 mid-term elections -- and possibly the Presidency in 2008

http://www.wndbookservice.com/products/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=c6872#continue

If we gave the Generals free rein they could wipe out the enemy in both countries in a month or less. The problem is not a lack of military power, it's the PC running of the war.

If we fought WWII like this the Axis powers would have won. Tip toeing around with ground troops hamstrung by bogus rules of engagement is not going to cut it.

Obama couldn't be bothered to talk to his general for months. Winning the war is not his priority.

It is a sad state of affairs indeed.

Tip toeing around with ground troops hamstrung by bogus rules of engagement is not going to cut it.

You're kidding right?




So you want to lay indiscrimate waste to the land and the Afganistan and Pakistan people, all of them men,women and children? And thats your answer?




Do you have a source to show we are not using our air force?




Your right our leaders do not want to kill innocent men women and children, our president is taking the needed time to determine what the best course of action will be part of the reason is that he does care about what happens to every man and woman who serves the country




Did you read this some where or have you experienced the hells of combat ?




What media? Are you making this up as you go along?

We have at our disposal B-52's, B-2 bombers, cruise missiles, smart bombs.

As I recall the insurgents don't have an air force, why aren't we using ours?

We are so worried about civilian casualties, we don't care if the policy leads to our soldiers dying.