Cheney: It Doesn't Matter What The Public Think

[240 is Back]

ED O'KEEFE
ABC
Saturday, November 4, 2006

Four days before the election, as Republican candidates battle to save their seats in Congress amid a backlash over the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News the administration is going "full speed ahead" with its policy.

"We've got the basic strategy right," Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on "This Week."

Watch the full interview this Sunday morning, including the vice president's candid comments on John Kerry's gaffe this week and Hillary Clinton.

October was one of the deadliest months in Iraq for U.S. troops. Cheney said that while the administration's policy may not be popular, "This is the right thing for us to be doing."

In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 57 percent of Americans said that the war was not worth fighting. The poll also showed President Bush's job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the second-lowest mark of his presidency.

Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush's Iraq policy.

"It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing," Cheney said. "We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."


First Reaction to Vanity Fair Report


Cheney also gave his first reaction to the Vanity Fair report that two of the Pentagon's strongest supporters of the war, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, now say they would not have supported the invasion if they had known how incompetently the administration would handle it.

Cheney said, "I haven't seen the piece I'm not going to comment on it. I think there is no question that it is a tough war, but it is also the right thing to do," he said. "And it is very important that we complete the mission."

Cheney asserted that the anti-war message is coming primarily from the Democrats, despite their own policy disagreements.

"They haven't offered up a plan, but they have several different positions — withdraw, withdraw at some future date, cut off funding," Cheney said. "The fact of the matter is, this is the right thing for us to be doing. We need to succeed here. It has a direct bearing on how we do around the world on the global war on terror."

On another subject, the vice president touted the Bush administration's economic policies, arguing that if Democrats take control of Congress, the tax cuts he and the president deem essential would not be extended. Cheney then complained that the White House had not been given enough credit on the economy, which he described as going "gangbusters."

When asked why he thinks the president doesn't get enough credit for the economy and the recent news that the nation has a 4.4 percent unemployment rate, Cheney said, "Well, you guys don't help," referring to the media.

"What's news is if there's bad news, and that gets coverage," he said. "But the good news that's out there, day after day after day, doesn't get as much attention."

[240 is Back]

Neocons turn on Bush for incompetence over Iraq war

Julian Borger
London Guardian
Saturday, November 4, 2006

Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting.
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.

"I think the influence will be on morale [among Republicans]," said Steven Clemons, the head of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation. "I think they are confusing the right. What this is yielding is ambivalence, and people will stay at home."
Mr Perle, a member of the influential Defence Policy Board that advised the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in the run-up to the war, is as outspoken in denouncing the conduct of the war as he was once bullish on the invasion. He blamed "dysfunction" in the Bush administration for the present quagmire.

"The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly," Mr Perle told Vanity Fair, according to early excerpts of the article. "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible."

Asked if he would still have pushed for war knowing what he knows now, Mr Perle, a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, said: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'." The Bush administration admits it was mistaken in believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but the president and other top officials maintain that Iraq is better off as a result of his removal.

An overwhelming majority of Americans, however, now believe the war was not worth the cost in blood and resources. The public rethink by top neocons comes at a time of rising violence, with the US death toll climbing steadily towards 3,000 and the United Nations estimating that many Iraqis may be being killed by the conflict each month.

Kenneth Adelman, another Reagan era hawk who sat on the Defence Policy Board until last year, drew attention with a 2002 commentary in the Washington Post predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk".

[Cavalier22]

liberating it was a catwalk.  but setting up a new regime is not