http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI27Ak01.htmlBush has a battle on his hands
By Jim Lobe
As the Washington, DC, area recovers from effects of Hurricane Isabel, US President George W Bush keeps trying to divert the potential "perfect storm" forming from the combination of the constant stream of bad news coming out of the Middle East and growing domestic discontent over the war and occupation in Iraq.
That storm is likely to gain even more force when the public has a chance to absorb this past week's events, which mostly slid under the media radar as Isabel approached the capital. Particularly striking were signs of growing disarray at the highest levels of the administration, revealed by remarks such as Bush's assertion that there was "no evidence" linking Iraq to the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. This statement directly contradicted both what Vice President Dick Cheney claimed as recently as September 14 and what he and some Pentagon officials had been advocating months before the war.
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Calls for Rumsfeld to resign
The most striking call for resignations this week came from John Murtha, the powerful ranking member of the appropriations defense subcommittee, who strongly supported the Iraq war. Appearing with Pelosi, a pairing that the Capitol Hill weekly Roll Call said "signaled a new level of unity among House Democrats", the conservative Pennsylvania Democrat, decorated Vietnam veteran and longtime champion of big defense budgets accepted blame for believing what administration officials told him before the war about the threat posed by ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
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If that was not enough, lawmakers from both parties are also expressing growing alarm at the US$87 billion request Bush submitted almost two weeks ago to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. Not only have administration officials conceded that sum will not be sufficient to get them through the year, recent soundings of foreign allies, which the administration was counting on to cough up $10 billion to $20 billion more, have been more than disappointing.
With a donors' conference scheduled in Madrid next month, analysts say Washington will be lucky to get one-tenth of what it is asking, unless it accepts a new United Nations Security Council resolution that requires Washington to give up control of the political and economic aspects of the occupation.(SNIP)
Some senior Republicans are now calling publicly for the State Department to assume control of the occupation in Iraq. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, backed by another top Republican foreign-policy spokesman, Chuck Hagel, has already promised to hold hearings to "think through what is the most appropriate branch of government" to handle the situation.
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