Imperialist Watch
2006-11-19 15:27:35 UTC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111801076_pf.html
Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a
couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President
Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk"
Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting
President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.
Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and
Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer
on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately
responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."
Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the
Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle
to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final
chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election
defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the
strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are
registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for
losing Congress.
A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years.
By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to
denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off
his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra
scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies
take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq
venture.
"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last
week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic
situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."
The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the
campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White
House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N.
Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the
war.
Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the
president.
"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House
speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush
waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.
"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen.
Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the
Judiciary Committee."
And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott
(Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped
orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their
faith entirely in Bush.
Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone
holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said
David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based
initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House
of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this
was a White House that held itself up as holy."
Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different
approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on
promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in
Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said,
"so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."
The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the
president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington,
according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at
what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some
of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or
Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they
believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his
administration.
The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism
originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell
began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary
of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W.
Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost
on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books
such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L.
Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government,
culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers
called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.
On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the
conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of
irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal
immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to
Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.
Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives
who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle,
Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the
ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that
could be turned into an opportunity.
In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was
occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led
by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I
had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation,
then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target
Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."
Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003
invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents
being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different
from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct
it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical
before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."
White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was
over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said
of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the
midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives
are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out
and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.
Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute,
said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes
they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us
who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said.
"There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but
very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person
most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons
should not get too angry at Bush about that."
It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq
could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our
plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we
can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."
Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as
Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close
to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one
point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington
Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."
But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman
said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient
night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass
destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop
the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal
of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was
Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul
Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.
"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can
give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said.
All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the
most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the
president is ultimately responsible."
Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want
to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out,
resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the
Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.
"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like
everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he
bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that
turns bad, you do have some responsibility."
Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of
using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is
really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is
disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."
--
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our
problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the
dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and
millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that
people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation
and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient
while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand
thieves are running the country. That's our problem. - Howard Zinn
Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a
couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President
Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk"
Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting
President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.
Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and
Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer
on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately
responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."
Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the
Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle
to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final
chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election
defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the
strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are
registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for
losing Congress.
A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years.
By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to
denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off
his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra
scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies
take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq
venture.
"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last
week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic
situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."
The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the
campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White
House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N.
Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the
war.
Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the
president.
"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House
speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush
waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.
"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen.
Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the
Judiciary Committee."
And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott
(Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped
orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their
faith entirely in Bush.
Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone
holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said
David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based
initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House
of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this
was a White House that held itself up as holy."
Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different
approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on
promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in
Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said,
"so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."
The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the
president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington,
according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at
what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some
of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or
Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they
believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his
administration.
The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism
originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell
began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary
of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W.
Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost
on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books
such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L.
Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government,
culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers
called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.
On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the
conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of
irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal
immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to
Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.
Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives
who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle,
Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the
ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that
could be turned into an opportunity.
In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was
occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led
by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I
had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation,
then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target
Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."
Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003
invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents
being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different
from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct
it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical
before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."
White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was
over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said
of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the
midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives
are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out
and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.
Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute,
said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes
they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us
who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said.
"There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but
very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person
most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons
should not get too angry at Bush about that."
It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq
could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our
plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we
can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."
Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as
Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close
to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one
point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington
Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."
But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman
said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient
night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass
destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop
the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal
of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was
Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul
Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.
"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can
give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said.
All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the
most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the
president is ultimately responsible."
Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want
to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out,
resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the
Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.
"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like
everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he
bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that
turns bad, you do have some responsibility."
Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of
using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is
really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is
disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."
--
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our
problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the
dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and
millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that
people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation
and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient
while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand
thieves are running the country. That's our problem. - Howard Zinn