[Mb-civic] GOP Leaders Join Chorus of Rumsfeld Detractors

[Michael Butler]

Also see below:     
Neo-Cons on the Road to Damascus    €

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    GOP Leaders Join Chorus of Rumsfeld Detractors
    By Stephen J. Hedges
    The Chicago Tribune

     Saturday 18 December 2004

     Washington - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is accustomed to the
barbs of public life. Any number of people, for the most part Democrats,
have been complaining about him since 1969, when he joined the Nixon
administration.

     But a different roster of A-list critics is now finding fault with
Rumsfeld's management of the military and the war in Iraq. And the sharpest
jabs are coming from noteworthy Republicans, including Sens. John McCain of
Arizona; Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader from Mississippi, and
Susan Collins, the Maine senator who just helped shepherd intelligence
reform through Congress.

     McCain said he has lost confidence in Rumsfeld, Lott said he should
quit sometime in the next year and Collins wrote him a letter asking him
about armor on vehicles in Iraq, or the lack of it.

     Outside government, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly
Standard, called for Rumsfeld to resign, writing that the soldiers "deserve
a better defense secretary than the one we have."

     He was joined by Thomas Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American
Enterprise Institute, who called Rumsfeld "an arrogant and isolated Beltway
bigwig."

     Taken together, Rumsfeld's critics are voicing pent-up frustrations
over the conduct and cost of the war in Iraq, its effect on an overtaxed
military, and a series of Pentagon scandals and investigations that include
the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the use of prewar intelligence and ties to an
Iraqi opposition group, and federal convictions linked to a no-bid contract
for Air Force tanker planes.

     'Days are Numbered'

    "This is a trend," said analyst Loren Thompson, president of the
Lexington Institute, a Washington-area defense think tank. "What's happening
now is that, with the problems in Iraq appearing not to improve, all the
reservations about Rumsfeld are becoming more acceptable to voice in public.
It is so rare for senior senators from the secretary's own party to say they
have no confidence in him. The fact of the matter is, his days are numbered
now."

     Not so, says the White House. President Bush's aides have been buffeted
for more than a week with questions about Rumsfeld's comments and his future
in the Cabinet, and at every turn they've offered assurances that Rumsfeld
is staying.

     "The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is someone who is an
important member of our team and someone who is helping us to move forward
as we defeat the ideology of hatred that leads to terrorism," White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday.

     Rumsfeld spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "There are comments from
[Capitol] Hill criticizing him and comments supporting him. The secretary
has nothing new to say about this."

     The impetus for the calls for Rumsfeld's resignation was the
secretary's Dec. 8 meeting with troops in Kuwait, and his answer to a
soldier's complaint about the lack of armored vehicles for duty in Iraq.

     Rumsfeld bluntly replied: "You go to war with the Army you have.
They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

     The soldier's unit went safely into Iraq, the Army said later, with the
final installation of armor on its vehicles completed within 24 hours of the
complaint. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, returned to a free-fire zone in
Washington, where his comments became a touchstone for the ill will that has
been building in both parties.

     Some of the frustration within the GOP is motivated by complaints that
members of Congress hear from constituents whose sons and daughters are
driving in unarmored Humvees, or whose spouses have been held over in Iraq
or are returning there for a second tour. For National Guard members, that
means leaving behind careers and families and household finances.

     Few Answers 

    Others are angry over lending support to the war based on the promising
postconflict scenarios that Rumsfeld and his aides predicted. Now those same
politicians need answers that will satisfy voters. And good answers are hard
to find.

     "While Bush doesn't have to run again, these guys have to in 2006,"
said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official and now a senior fellow at
the Center for American Progress. "I think that Rumsfeld, and that infamous
meeting [in Kuwait], became a metaphor for the American people about what's
going wrong there."

     If so, that would help explain the visceral reaction that Rumsfeld's
performance drew from Senate GOP leaders. Rumsfeld, despite his years of
Washington experience and his service in the House during the 1960s, has not
fared well on the Hill during the last four years. The reason, staff members
say, is simple: Rumsfeld, a natural glad-hander, hasn't worked hard enough
to satisfy those who would be his allies, or to disarm those who were his
known enemies.

     With elections in Iraq scheduled for Jan. 30, few would expect a change
at the top of the Pentagon before then. How those elections are conducted,
and whether they push Iraq's nascent government forward and help reduce the
daily cycle of violence, could influence Rumsfeld's prospects.

     But odds that the vote will go well are not good. U.S. military
commanders in Iraq have predicted increased violence as the election
approaches.

     "Right after the election Rumsfeld will probably resign," Korb
predicted. "He'll say, 'I've done my job, I've seen the election through,
produced a new defense budget.' Whatever else people may think about Bush,
he's a good politician. ... He knows that if he forces Rumsfeld out, it's an
admission that the war was wrong."

     Though a politician at heart, Rumsfeld was kept out of the 2004
presidential campaign, with Bush advisers recognizing how difficult the war
issue might be on the campaign trail. During the next month, after time off
for the holidays, the installation of a new Congress with bigger Republican
majorities in both houses and Bush's second inauguration on Jan. 20, the
boiling anger over Rumsfeld could be reduced to a simmer.

     But calls for his resignation could just as easily pick up again in
late January, as the new Congress takes up defense spending issues and the
Senate Armed Services Committee convenes hearings to examine the Pentagon's
prewar planning.

     "There's no question that Rumsfeld is a man of courage and conviction,"
said analyst Thompson. "But the problem is he will stick with a position
long after the rest of the world has concluded it's wrong. If you're going
to be a man of conviction, you're going to have to live with the verdict of
the marketplace."

   


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    Neo-Cons on the Road to Damascus
    By Jim Lobe 
    Inter Press Service

     Saturday 18 December 2004

     Washington - Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest
with U.S. demands to secure its border with Iraq, and even making
unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion
shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take stronger measures
against Damascus, possibly including military action.

     The media campaign was launched last week when three analysts
associated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a
neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of Israel's right-wing
Likud Party, published an article in the Washington Times titled "Syria's
murderous role: Assad aides [sic] Iraq's terrorist insurgency".

     Then William Kristol, the influential chairman of the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC) and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly
Standard, devoted his lead editorial, "Getting serious about Syria", to the
same subject, concluding that, despite the stresses on the U.S. military in
Iraq, "real options exist" for dealing with Damascus.

     "We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the
border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal
in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the
planning and organizing center for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could
covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition ... "

     On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal followed up in its lead editorial
- always a reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East -
charging, "Syria is providing material support to terrorist groups killing
American soldiers in Iraq while openly calling on Iraqis to join the
'resistance'."

     The editorial, "Serious About Syria?" accused the Bush administration
of responding to these provocations with "mixed political signals and weak
gestures", and urged it to at least threaten military action, much as Turkey
"mobilized for war against Syria" in 1998 over Damascus' support for Kurdish
rebels.

     Within hours, President George W Bush himself was talking tough on
Damascus. Asked during a White House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq's defense minister of
alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the Sunni insurgency, the president
warned the two countries that "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is
not in their interest".

     In some ways, the new campaign against Syria recalls a similar effort
that began building in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq
in March 2003. Then, Washington was seen as an irresistible force in the
region, and neo-conservatives and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appeared to
be spoiling for a fight with Syria, which, they charged, was harboring
senior members of the formerly ruling Ba'ath Party and Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction.

     But, as the insurgency grew more potent in the fall of 2003, Bush's
chief political aide, Karl Rove, ordered the hawks to stand down, lest a new
military adventure cost the president his re-election. Now that Bush has won
a second term, they need not worry about the possible political
consequences.

     But that fails to explain precisely why the hawks are making such a
fuss over Syria at this moment, particularly given the prevailing Washington
consensus - including among the hawks themselves - that Iran's nuclear
program represents a much more important strategic challenge to the
administration.

     In contrast to the charges that were made against Damascus 16 months
ago, the new campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged statements by
unidentified U.S. military and intelligence officials cited in the
Washington Times op-ed and a subsequent Washington Post news article, to the
effect that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organized, funded and even
managed by, as the Post put it, "a handful of Iraqi Ba'athists operating in
Syria".

     One supposedly critical piece of evidence much cited by the hawks was
the reported discovery of a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb
factory in the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which "contained
waypoints originating in western Syria".

     These mostly anonymous accounts were recently echoed by visiting King
Abdullah of Jordan and Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar, who also charged, as has
Washington, that Syria has trained and helped infiltrate its own and other
"foreign fighters" into Iraq.

     The Post quoted one former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, who
said, "There is an increasing view [in the intelligence community] that
Syria is at the center of the problem."

     While Kristol and others have seized on these reports as proof of
Syria's sinister role in Iraq, they have ignored other evidence of increased
cooperation by Damascus, particularly in sealing its border.

     Indeed, on the same day that Kristol issued his call to arms against
Damascus, the Journal's news reporters published an article that began:
"Senior military officers and other U.S. officials say Syria has made a
serious effort in recent weeks to stanch the flow of fighters moving across
its border into and out of Iraq, and has arrested at least one former Iraqi
Ba'athist accused by the U.S. of helping to finance and coordinate the
insurgency."

     At the same time, a number of published accounts about the aftermath of
the capture of Fallujah established that the number of Syrian and other
"foreign fighters" involved in the insurgency there was far less than had
been expected, putting paid to the theory that foreigners from Syria or
elsewhere were a major factor in the uprising, as had long been claimed by
the Pentagon and its neo-con backers.

     As Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, suggested
in his Internet log, or "blog", the hawks want a foreign scapegoat for an
insurgency about which they still know remarkably little.

     "Post-Fallujah," according to Landis, "the analysts decided that if the
resistance was not powered by Syrians, then it was led by Iraqis living in
Syria; hence the spate of articles suggesting the defense department had
adopted this view. It will be interesting to see if it has more staying
power than the last theory."

     Moreover, added Landis, the U.S. administration has little to lose.
"Washington isn't having much luck with other strategies for defeating the
resistance and Syria has been quite cooperative in the past and will
probably be so in the future. So why not mount yet another Syria-bashing
campaign?"

     Bassam Haddad, who teaches Arab politics at St Joseph's University in
Philadelphia, told IPS he sees the current campaign as an effort to
intimidate Damascus, with two aims in sight.

     First, the hawks want to gain more cooperation from Damascus on
tightening its borders with Iraq and arresting or expelling Ba'athist exiles
in Syria who may indeed - according to both Landis and Haddad - be
supporting the insurgency in various ways. Second, pressing Syria could
further tilt the regional balance of power in Israel's favor, at a moment
when prospects for renewed peace negotiations are brighter than they have
been in a very long time.

     "There's very little happening in Iraq today that Syria is responsible
for ... so, if there is some kind of strategy behind all of this, it is
probably to apply pressure for concessions leading to eventual negotiations
with the Israelis," particularly with respect to Syrian support for
Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian groups operating in Damascus, said
Haddad.

     The current campaign may also reflect a growing sense of urgency among
the neo-cons, in particular, that "a window of opportunity" for pressuring
Syria is closing as the situation in Iraq deteriorates. "I think these
factions would like to see something done about Syria before it becomes
hugely unpopular to take military action," he added.

     But both experts suggest a risk in applying too much pressure on the
regime of President Bashar al-Assad which, according to Landis, will be
extremely reluctant to enter into a major fight on Bush's behalf with many
of the 500,000 Iraqis who have come to Syria in the past year, "not to
mention with local Islamists and mosque leaders".

     "I fear, as do many in the State Department who know Syria," said
Haddad, "that the current Syrian regime is far more preferable to both
Syrians and Americans than possible alternatives ... the best organized of
which are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims."

  

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