March 30, 2003	Sunday	Muharram 26, 1424

WASHINGTON: Just a week ago, Richard Perle, the powerful chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB) and the leader of the neo-conservative hawks who have pushed the drive to war in Iraq, reportedly threw a victory party at his house in celebration of the US-led invasion.

One week later, a far less cheerful Perle not only resigned as DPB chairman amid mounting conflict-of-interest questions, but also “slammed down the phone” on an inquiring New York Times reporter who had disclosed his controversial financial relationship with the bankrupt Global Crossings company last week.

Perle’s anger — particularly remarkable given his reputation as the “Prince of Darkness” for charm and diplomacy — may only have reflected his personal feelings about having been embarrassed by a possible ethical breach of the kind that is only too typical of influential Washington consultants with extensive government contacts and experience.

Or it could signal something much, much more important that may determine the balance of power within the administration of President George W. Bush.

For the first time in memory, the neo-conservatives, whose ideology and media and political savvy have fuelled the imperial trajectory of the administration since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, are on the defensive and taking hits from just about every direction.

They are being blamed in particular for the growing public impression that the US military campaign is not going according to plan and may indeed be bogging down, exposing US servicemen and women to much greater risks and a much longer war than virtually anyone, especially the neo-conservatives, had foreseen.

More than any other group, it was the neo-conservatives who surround Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, like Perle and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had predicted that the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would collapse like a house of cards once the Pentagon’s “shock and awe” strategy was on full display.

It was they who also predicted that the Iraqi military would surrender in the tens of thousands at the first hint of battle and that common Iraqis, particularly the Shias in the south, would greet the US “liberators” with flowers and sweets.

“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” argued Kenneth Adelman, a prominent neo-conservative and member of Perle’s DPB, in a ‘Washington Post’ column last February that was cited in both the Post and the Times on Friday as typical of the neo-conservatives’ confidence.

“There may be pockets of resistance, but very few Iraqis are going to fight to defend Saddam Hussein,” Perle said in one of scores of television appearances at the same time, in what appeared to be a concerted and ultimately successful propaganda effort to move the focus of Bush’s war on terrorism from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda to Saddam and Iraq.

Although the Iraqi leader’s regime may indeed be as brittle as the neo-conservatives have argued, their favoured scenarios, on which much of the war’s planning was ultimately based, do not appear to be playing out, as Adelman admitted to the Times on Friday, saying he might have been “too glib”.

This was confirmed rather thunderously Thursday by none other than the commander of the Army forces in the Gulf, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, who told reporters that the war was likely to take longer than had been predicted by confident Pentagon policymakers.

“The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against, because of these paramilitary forces,” he said. “We knew they were there, but we did not know how they would fight.”

Despite these admissions, the hawks, including Rumsfeld and the neo-conservatives like Wolfowitz who surround him, still insist that the war is going well and blame what setbacks and disappointments have taken place on sandstorms and atrocities committed against the civilian population and Iraqi soldiers who wish to lay down their arms by Saddam’s ‘fedayeen’ militia and armed Baath Party forces.

But these explanations have failed to quash doubts, even among some of the neo-conservatives’ closest allies. “I think we hawks might have underestimated the Iraqis’ sense of national violation at being invaded, despite their hatred of Saddam,” magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan told the Times.

If so, it was a major strategic miscalculation, and while no one here is yet predicting that Washington will not ultimately win the war, the big question has become at what cost — in US and Iraqi lives, particularly if US troops have to fight street- by-street and house-to-house in Baghdad — and to Washington’s plummeting global image from beneficent hegemon to arrogant bully.

Already, the knives are out, and it is clear that the neo- conservatives are the most natural and easiest targets.

Not only have they been the principal and most visible — not to say ubiquitous — cheerleaders for war against Iraq virtually since the Sept 11. attacks. They were also the champions for an Afghanistan-like war strategy that relied exclusively on lightly armed special operations forces (SOF) working with rebel forces based in northern Iraq and precision-guided bombing, with a force of only 50,000 US troops held in reserve.

Now the neo-conservatives’ foes in the bureaucracy are essentially saying, “We told you so”.

Retired generals noted repeatedly this week that the Army had always argued for a much heavier invading force moving at a far more deliberate speed. The lightning strike to Baghdad, they said, was inconsistent with the post-Vietnam military doctrine of using overwhelming force at all points of the battlefield.

At the same time, unnamed officials at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) are telling reporters that they had warned that Saddam’s militias would resist US forces, but that these warnings were not passed on.

The same sources have complained repeatedly over the past year that neo-conservatives in the Pentagon and the White House were shading or side-tracking analyses with which they did not agree.

While these explanations might appear to be ordinary bureaucratic buck-passing, they are clearly hitting their target. Not only are the neo-conservatives worried and on the defensive, but their most powerful fan, the super-confident Rumsfeld himself, has been uncharacteristically testy all week.—Dawn/InterPress News Service.