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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (429113)	7/18/2003 1:24:46 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

Since 1985, the Defense Policy Board has offered advice to top Pentagon officials on a range of military issues, usually providing a diversity of views. During the Bush administration, though, members of the innocuous sounding board have used inside access and outside voices to press a long-held belief that the U.S. should oust Saddam Hussein. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they add, has purged all but four of the previous board members and replaced them with a group of unabashed Iraq hawks, changing an advisory panel into a virtual war council. "It's never been anything like this," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton national security aide and now a Brookings Institution senior fellow. "The Defense Policy Board was always a very quiet sort of panel that served the secretary. It certainly was not a lobbying organization. This has become a lobby, with a particular point of view where the neo-conservatives of the world, the democratic imperialist point of view, holds sway." Even some of the board's members — who range from Henry Kissinger to Newt Gingrich to Dan Quayle — acknowledge a similarity in their views. The board is "rather conservative," said panel member Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant defense secretary who served in the Ford and Reagan administrations. "We have Democrats, Republicans, and we're all kind of hard-line and therefore, yes, we generally agree on these things." That hard line caused controversy recently when news reports revealed that the board had received a briefing from an outside analyst who argued that Saudi Arabia supports terrorism and should be a U.S. enemy. Rumsfeld quickly declared Saudi Arabia a loyal ally and said that the analyst's view was not U.S. policy. "Unwanted publicity" is how Perle summarized the episode. Perle, Adelman and Woolsey have for years used their media access to express the dangers of Hussein. All three support a theory posited by Laurie Mylroie, a well-known terrorism expert and author, who argues that Hussein was behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and has been a vital ally to terrorists like bin Laden. Woolsey even made a personal trip to London last fall — misreported, Perle said, as a Defense Policy Board mission—to examine possible links between al-Qaida and Hussein. globalsecurity.org