Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says

By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
The New York Times

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

Consistent Remarks

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process."

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi government. "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," the prime minister is quoted as saying.

"Bush agreed," Mr. Manning wrote. This exchange, like most of the quotations in this article, have not been previously reported.

Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides: Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street memo.

By late January 2003, United Nations inspectors had spent six weeks in Iraq hunting for weapons under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized "serious consequences" if Iraq voluntarily failed to disarm. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors had reported little cooperation from Mr. Hussein, and no success finding any unconventional weapons.

At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and plans for the aftermath of the war.

Discussing Provocation

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

Mr. Sands first reported the proposals in his book, although he did not use any direct quotations from the memo. He is a professor of international law at University College of London and the founding member of the Matrix law office in London, where the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, is a partner.

Mr. Jones, the National Security Council spokesman, declined to discuss the proposals, saying, "We are not going to get into discussing private discussions of the two leaders."

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."

Running Out of Time

Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway."

The leaders agreed that three weeks remained to obtain a second United Nations Security Council resolution before military commanders would need to begin preparing for an invasion.

Summarizing statements by the president, the memo says: "The air campaign would probably last four days, during which some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the early collapse of Saddam's regime. Given this military timetable, we needed to go for a second resolution as soon as possible. This probably meant after Blix's next report to the Security Council in mid-February."

Mr. Blair was described as responding that both countries would make clear that a second resolution amounted to "Saddam's final opportunity." The memo described Mr. Blair as saying: "We had been very patient. Now we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months."

It reported: "Bush agreed. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us. At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions — assuming we did — we should warn Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go."

Mr. Bush devoted much of the meeting to outlining the military strategy. The president, the memo says, said the planned air campaign "would destroy Saddam's command and control quickly." It also said that he expected Iraq's army to "fold very quickly." He also is reported as telling the prime minister that the Republican Guard would be "decimated by the bombing."

Despite his optimism, Mr. Bush said he was aware that "there were uncertainties and risks," the memo says, and it goes on, "As far as destroying the oil wells were concerned, the U.S. was well equipped to repair them quickly, although this would be easier in the south of Iraq than in the north."

The two men briefly discussed plans for a post-Hussein Iraqi government. "The prime minister asked about aftermath planning," the memo says. "Condi Rice said that a great deal of work was now in hand.

Referring to the Defense Department, it said: "A planning cell in D.O.D. was looking at all aspects and would deploy to Iraq to direct operations as soon as the military action was over. Bush said that a great deal of detailed planning had been done on supplying the Iraqi people with food and medicine."

Planning for After the War

The leaders then looked beyond the war, imagining the transition from Mr. Hussein's rule to a new government. Immediately after the war, a military occupation would be put in place for an unknown period of time, the president was described as saying. He spoke of the "dilemma of managing the transition to the civil administration," the memo says.

The document concludes with Mr. Manning still holding out a last-minute hope of inspectors finding weapons in Iraq, or even Mr. Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq. But Mr. Manning wrote that he was concerned this could not be accomplished by Mr. Bush's timeline for war.

"This makes the timing very tight," he wrote. "We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find, and work hard on the other members of the Security Council to accept the noncooperation case so that we can secure the minimum nine votes when we need them, probably the end of February."

At a White House news conference following the closed-door session, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said "the crisis" had to be resolved in a timely manner. "Saddam Hussein is not disarming," the president told reporters. "He is a danger to the world. He must disarm. And that's why I have constantly said — and the prime minister has constantly said — this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months."

Despite intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president on that late January day at the White House.

Business as usual despite GOP grumbling

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID E. SANGER

Inside the White House, the staff is exhausted and the mood is defiant. Republicans are clamoring for a new chief of staff, the West Wing just cut its losses on a deal that would have given a Dubai company control of some terminal operations at six American ports, and President Bush's approval rating is at a record low.

But senior staff members insist that Mr. Bush is in good spirits, that calls from his party to inject new blood into the White House make him ever more stubborn to keep the old, and that he has become so inured to outside criticism that he increasingly tunes it out. There is no sense of crisis, they say, even over rebellious Republicans in Congress, because the White House has been in almost constant crisis since Sept. 11, 2001, and Mr. Bush has never had much regard for Congress anyway.

"You know, people say to me, my buddies in Texas, 'How do you handle all this stuff?' " Mr. Bush said at a gathering of newspaper editors Friday in Washington. "You know, it's just after a while you get used to it."

Staff members, many of whom have been with Mr. Bush since he first began running for president in 1999, responded on Friday in a familiar way: To mark the three-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, they announced that Mr. Bush would give a new round of speeches, starting Monday at George Washington University.

As ever, there will be no change in policy. Mr. Bush will talk, they said, about new progress in defeating "improvised explosive devices" and argue that the televised pictures of rising casualties and sectarian fighting obscure progress under way.

But to answer criticism from both parties that Iraq cannot be fixed with another good-news speech, Mr. Bush will also try to confront the realities of the war. "Amid the daily news of car bombs and kidnappings and brutal killings, I can understand why many of our fellow citizens are now wondering if the entire mission is worth it," Mr. Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address, foreshadowing one of the themes of his Monday speech.

As Mr. Bush struggles yet again to change public opinion on Iraq, Republicans say there is no escaping the truth that the White House has careered from crisis to crisis in the second term and that the president has yet to develop a coherent agenda.

Every development, they say, including Vice President Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of a fellow hunter and the arrest on Thursday of Mr. Bush's former domestic policy adviser, Claude A. Allen, on theft charges, points to a White House that seems to be losing its once-vaunted discipline and control.

The ports deal was a case in point, they said. Even White House officials acknowledged that by the time a delegation of Congressional Republicans told Mr. Bush in the Oval Office on Thursday morning that it was a lost cause, Mr. Bush put up no fight.

By midafternoon, after the Dubai company had dropped out of the deal, the president just seemed relieved that the storm was over. In a gathering at the White House, Mr. Bush faked a playful punch at Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who led opposition to the deal, then pinched Mr. King's cheek.

But if the president was determined to project cheer about cutting his losses, the uproar over the ports has set off bleak assessments from both parties in Washington that the White House has lost its focus, energy and political touch.

"With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they should have known it would create a storm," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, speaking of the ports deal, which he had supported.

It was only the latest crisis to hit Mr. Bush in a second term that has been dominated by problems in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, a C.I.A. leak investigation, a secret eavesdropping program and the failure of the president to push forward the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, an overhaul of Social Security.

But the Dubai deal exposed as never before the limits of Republican loyalty to a weakened Mr. Bush, whose record low approval ratings, 34 percent in a CBS poll conducted in February, have pushed members of his own party to declare that the White House can no longer call all the shots. By the end of the week, the ports deal had brought to a boiling point years of anger on Capitol Hill about a White House seen as imperious and dismissive of real consultation with Congress.

"They have a transmitter but not a listening device," said one well-known Republican with close ties to the administration who gets calls from White House staff members. "They'll say, 'What are you hearing, what's going on?' You tell them things aren't good on the Hill, you've got problems here, you've got problems there, or 'I was in Detroit and boy did I get an earful.' And their answer is, 'Everybody's just reading the headlines, we've got to get our message out better.' There's denial going on, and it starts at the top."

The bottom line, Republicans say, is that the war continues to overshadow the domestic agenda that Mr. Bush put forth in January in a State of the Union address that was supposed to reinvigorate his presidency.

"Roughly one out of three people say that the country is on the wrong track, and the reason they give is the Iraq war," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster. "How will that situation be changed unless Iraq is resolved in the next few months? So the White House can do all the good things they're doing with renewable energy and health care and all their other initiatives, but that doesn't move that chunk of people with very hardened attitudes."

At the White House, senior aides say they are well aware of such polls and of widespread Republican complaints about the isolation of an administration now in its sixth difficult year. "There's an acute situational awareness of the criticism being leveled at the staff," said Nicolle Wallace, the White House communications director.

At this point, Republicans close to the White House say, Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, has no plans to step down and in fact is only seven months away from beating Sherman Adams's record under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the longest-serving chief of staff in history.

At the same time, the legal status of Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's senior political adviser, is in limbo. He is still under investigation in the C.I.A. leak case, although his lawyer expresses confidence that Mr. Rove will be cleared.

But the uncertainty surrounding such a crucial member of Mr. Bush's inner circle has fed perceptions that a once politically agile White House is off its game. Republicans say that the port security case in particular has become a case study in how this White House has been slow to react to the unexpected, and how its early warning radar is off.

"It's always the same story," said an administration official who no longer works in the White House but who would evaluate its problems only on the condition of anonymity. "They have a plan — an elaborate plan of the president's message, day by day. But there's something in the system that has a hard time coping with the unexpected," the official said, citing Hurricane Katrina, the dispute over Harriet E. Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court, and now the port issue.

Mr. Bush's first public comments on the matter — a defiant veto threat issued to reporters in an unusual briefing on Air Force One, then repeated on the South Lawn of the White House — antagonized Congress. The White House did not warn House or Senate Republican leaders that the veto threat was coming, aides in both chambers said, and the president's words immediately thrust the dispute into the context of a political battle, with the Republicans on the losing side.

What Mr. Bush should have done, Mr. McCain said, was "get Colin Powell and General Abizaid and Tommy Franks to come out and make public statements about why this is vital."

Although the president had committed himself to supporting the deal, the White House evidently did little to save it. Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who led the effort to keep the acquisition intact, said he had almost no contact with the White House about the matter until Thursday morning.

Mr. Warner said he had sought to enlist the administration in creating an alternative structure for the deal that might mollify Congress. "I was trying to determine if the company came forward with a proposal, would the White House be able to take a look at it and review it?" Mr. Warner said.

Asked if he was surprised that the White House had not worked with the company to defend or restructure the deal, Mr. Warner said, "I don't get surprised by anything anymore."

Carl Hulse, David D. Kirkpatrick and Adam Nagourney contributed reporting for this article.

Bush is going down

by Bernard Weiner

I'm more and more convinced that it will be Republicans, many of them of the true conservative and realist kind, who effectively will do in the Bush Administration.

In this, I am reminded of the behavior of Richard Nixon when he realized that he was fast losing his middle-class, bourgeois base: He called it quits on the Vietnam War, and likewise on his presidency after his crimes were exposed.

But unlike Nixon's crew, Bush&Co. seem willing to take the country down with them, so desperate are they to hold onto power, deplete the treasury, pay off their corporate friends, carry out their ideological revolution -- and keep themselves out of the federal slammer.

The crimes of the Bush Administration are so many and varied that none of us should be surprised by anything that might happen in the coming weeks and months: Bin Laden captured or reported killed, a U.S.-Israeli air assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. to be followed by martial law, the announcement of a bird-flu outbreak with the military placed in charge. I'm pretty level-headed and don't usually think in these dire terms, but these guys have backed themselves into a tight political corner and are desperate -- and dangerous.

THE IMPLODING SCANDALS

Bush is at 34% approval rating (Cheney is at 18!), and their scandals are blowing up in their faces: Katrina lies and incompetence; Iraq lies and incompetence; the Dubai Ports deal and incompetence; GOP bribery and corruption; Libby under indictment and Rove apparently about to be; Bush claiming authority to authorize torture, spy on millions of American citizens and violate the law whenever he incants the magic words "national security"; Congress rebelling at being frozen out of decision-making, etc. etc. But in the face of all that, the Roveian M.O. is always to attack their foes and to hype the fright quotient.

The Administration didn't have to consider the most extreme options until recently, when the wheels started falling off the Bush bus. The attacks were no longer coming mostly from liberals and Democrats; more and more, they were coming from loyal conservative Republicans, who, cognizant of the sinking poll numbers, saw the handwriting on the wall: They realized they could well lose their majorities in the House and Senate -- in other words, severed from their jobs and access to the spoils of power -- and they started distancing themselves from the Administration.

So, rather than beating my usual drum here denouncing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration, I thought I'd just lay out the comments of those conservatives and let them speak for themselves. (My late friend Emile de Antonio, the documentary filmmaker, taught me a good lesson; it's always better, he pointed out, to quote what the Wall Street Journal is saying rather than quoting a hippie or left-activist making the same point. When your own posse smells the moral rot up top, the end is near.)

The quotes here are on Iraq and the neo-con ideologues who took this country to war, though currently the flak is also coming hot and heavy from the Right on both the domestic spying and Dubai ports scandals. (Even conservative Republican Senator Richard Shelby says Bush broke the law in the way he handled the Dubai ports contract, and neo-con leader Bill Kristol suggests the other "i" word ("incompetent") in describing how Bush&Co. stumble around trying to govern: "I think it's become in people's minds an emblem of the administration that just isn't as serious about the competent execution of the functions of government as it should be."

THE NEO-CONS BEHIND THE WAR

Let's begin with a reminder that the conservative establishment didn't agree from the very beginning with Bush's neo-con obsession to invade Iraq. President George H.W. Bush, who successfully organized a massive coalition to push Iraq's army out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, warned his son privately and through his spokesmen of the dangerous consequences both of invading and occupying Iraq and of doing so without wide international support. As he said of Iraq in "A World Transformed" (written with Gen. Brent Scowcroft): "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

Fast forward to the present, when so many Republican stalwarts are saying, in effect, that they backed the wrong horse. Their party was taken over by rightwing extremists, incompetent at that, whose reckless neo-con policies are doing great danger to the country and to the future of the once-great GOP. Here's Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, chair of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation, going even beyond the war into the deeper crimes being committed against Americans' freedoms:

"Most Americans do not yet realize that a war is being waged -- not against Iraq but against each of us. It is not the Republican Party that is charge in this administration but a small cadre who seized executive branch power and converted it to their own uses. Most Republicans are experiencing a deer-in-the-headlights moment right now. Their Party has been hijacked, their president has been hijacked, and they do not know what to do. I remain a registered Republican working for an effective coalition. The attack on us and on our rights has hardly begun. You don't go to the trouble of setting up this degree of control without having made plans to use it."

NEO-CON FUKUYAMA HAS SECOND THOUGHTS

Or try this out. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the 1992 neo-con best-seller "The End of History," is exhibiting some serious recantation these days in interviews and in his new book, "America at the Crossroads."

He now says that neo-conservatism has "evolved into something I can no longer support," and should be tossed onto history's pile of discredited ideologies. The doctrine, which has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes...is now in shambles," and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy.

For example, though he once supported regime change in Iraq, he now believes the war there is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. "The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally...

"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."

THE CHENEY-RUMSFELD CABAL

Then we go to a long-time Administration stalwart who couldn't take it any more: Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation last October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

Wilkerson has also focused attacks on the Bush administration for condoning torture, setting lax and ambiguous policies on treatment of detainees that inevitably led to the scandal of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere.

BUCKLEY BUCKLES TO REALITY

Onward to the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement, National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr., who concludes that what may have started as a decent move has evolved into disaster:

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. ... Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy. ... The kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."

THE TROOPS WANT OUT, SOON

Speaking of the troops in Iraq, recent polling reveals that nearly 3 out of 4 of U.S troops in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admits also that the Iraqis want us to leave "as soon as possible."

Here are some pertinent comments by a U.S. soldier in Iraq, writing as "djtyg," about why the desire to leave that country:

"We need to get out because our military cannot take much more of this. We are stretched too thin and it's about to get worse. ... Soldiers are frustrated. Every soldier I have talked to says that they are getting out of the military when they get home. Every. One. Of. Them. Regardless of rank, experience, or time in, they all want out. There has not been a single Soldier I've talked to that says they want to stay in. This includes officers, NCOs, and rookies who are on their first tour of duty. We need to get out of Iraq because Iraq is the reason why the military is shrinking. We, like Cindy Sheehan, are curious as to what 'noble cause' we are fighting for. We can't seem to find one. This is weakening America. At the rate we are going, we are going to have a military that can't fight because it has old and broken down equipment, and no troops to fight a war with."

SEN. HAGEL LOWERS THE BOOM

Then there are key Republican senators who are willing to stick out their necks by talking truth to power about Iraq. For example, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who said the U.S. is losing in Iraq and raised a parallel to an earlier conflict.

The Vietnam War, he said, "was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late. To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," he said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices."

O'REILLY QUESTIONS STAYING IN IRAQ

So, let's see: Bush is losing old-money Republican conservatives, GOP senators, neo-con theorists outside the Cheney-Rumsfeld nexus, military insiders, troops under fire in Iraq -- who else can he lose? Would you believe the lunatic fringe, as symbolized by that raving Limbaugh wannabee Bill O'Reilly? The Fox News pundit, who usually is in lockstep with the Bush program and calls anybody who criticizes those policies idiots and worse, had this to say the other day about the need to get out of Iraq ASAP:

"[We need to] hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible [because] there are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."

GOP DISCONTENT ON NATIONAL SECURITY

Well, one could go on and on with the criticism coming from the Right -- conservative former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts, Congressional Dem warhawk John Murtha, et al. The point is that the Republicans, formerly associated with a winning national-security message, are now regarded much differently by many GOP politicos and rank-and-file citizens.

Many Representatives and Senators also deeply resent the way the Congress has been frozen out of the power loop by the Bush Administration. "We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when they need us," Florida's conservative GOP Congressman Mark Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions -- we can't simply do it on trust."

Scott Reed, who managed Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, called the current low poll ratings for Bush and the GOP "pretty shattering," noting especially that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent. "The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women [voters] and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

THE PRESIDENT AS DICTATOR

"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, said James B. Steinberg, a dean at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."

For example, two staunch conservative Southern Senators won't accept Bush's Unified Executive theory of governance. "I think the administration has looked at the legitimate power of the executive during a time of war and taken it to extremes," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "[It's] to the point that we'd lose constitutional balance. Under their theory, there would be almost no role for the Congress or the courts." Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott was even more blunt: "Don't put your fist in my face."

EVEN WALL ST. IS TALKING IMPEACHMENT

All those defections from the Bush orbit are doing great damage to the once-unified Bush&Co. juggernaut, but I've left out one key one: Wall Street. The titans of finance are agitated, to the point of raising the awareness of the possibility of impeachment or even urging serious consideration of Bush's removal.

The Wall Street Journal, alone among mainstream daily newspapers, has deigned to mention that there is a growing impeachment movement and an active PAC (impeachpac.org). And here's some of what Barron's Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan wrote in that establishment financial journal:

...The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him...Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation...

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law. ...

THREE MORE YEARS?

So, friends, when we're down in the dumps, depressed by the fact that Bush&Co. are still in power even in the face of all their lies and bumblings and policies that result in thousands of people getting killed and maimed and tortured, let us consider that even their once-loyal rats are deserting the sinking ship of state.

The thought of nearly three more years of Bush&Co. misrule is too horrible to contemplate. So let's ratchet up the pressure, incorporate distressed GOP moderates and conservatives into the impeachment momentum, and send the Bush Bunker crew packing and return the country to reasonable people dedicated to a restoration of Constitutional rule of law and a realistic foreign policy. It's the least we can do for our country.



Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment, write crisispapers@comcast.net.

Copyright 2006, by Bernard Weiner

Source: The Crisis Papers

George the Unready

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times, 3/3/06

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the administration had "established effective contingency plans" — which it hadn't — and that it drop the assertion that some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration — there seems to be a new one every week — as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.