Some Key Conservatives Uneasy About Bush

WASHINGTON - When an influential group of conservatives gathers in downtown Washington each week, they often get a political pep talk from a senior Bush administration official or campaign aide. They don't expect a fellow Republican to deliver a blistering critique of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war.

But nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.

"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.

"It's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends," said Halper, who gave $1,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and more than $83,000 to other GOP causes in 2000. "This is not the cakewalk the neoconservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets."

Conservatives, the backbone of Bush's political base, are increasingly uneasy about the Iraq conflict and the steady drumbeat of violence in postwar Iraq, Halper and some of his fellow Republicans say. The conservatives' anxiety was fueled by the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal and has not abated with the transfer of political power to the interim Iraqi government.

Some Republicans fear angry conservatives will stay home in November, undercutting Bush's re-election bid.

"I don't think there's any question that there is growing restiveness in the Republican base about this war," said Halper, the co-author of a new book, "America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order."

Some Republicans dismiss the rift as little more than an inside-the-Beltway spat among rival factions of the GOP intelligentsia. Indeed, conservatives nationwide are still firmly behind Bush. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 97 percent of conservative Republicans favored Bush over Kerry.

"I am bitterly disappointed in his actions with this war. It is a total travesty," said Tom Hutchinson, 69, a self-described conservative from Sturgeon, Mo., who posted yard signs and staffed campaign phone banks for the Republican in 2000. Hutchinson said he did not believe the administration's stated rationales for the war, in particular the argument that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Hutchinson, a retired businessman and former college professor, said his unease with Iraq may lead him to do something he has not done since 1956: avoid the voting booth in a presidential election.

Jack Walters, 59, a self-described "classical conservative" from Columbia, Mo., said he hadn't decided which candidate to vote for.

"Having been through Vietnam, I thought no, never again," Walters said. "But here comes the same thing again, and I'm old enough to recognize the lame reasons given for going into Iraq, and they made me ill."

The tension has been building in official Washington, where conservative members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees have pressed the administration for answers on combat operations; disagreed with the Pentagon on troop levels; and expressed frustration with an administration they feel has shown them disdain by withholding information.

Chief political adviser Karl Rove's formula for re-election is primarily to push Bush's conservative base to the polls.

Another administration official involved in Bush's re-election effort has voiced concern that angry conservatives will sit out the election.

But Matthew Dowd, the Bush-Cheney campaign's chief strategist, described the fear of losing conservative support as "just ludicrous."

Bush is "as strong among conservative Republicans as any Republican president has been" - higher than President Reagan's approval among conservatives during his re-election campaign of 1984, Dowd said.

Yet, Halper said his critical review on the administration's performance on Iraq last week was met with expressions of support in the conservatives' weekly meeting, which is closed to journalists.

The marquee speaker sent by the administration was Eric Ciliberti, who spent several weeks in Iraq this year and told the audience of broad progress being made there.

Ciliberti complained to the group that the news media was not reporting the positive developments out of Iraq. Ciliberti did not return several calls late in the past week from a reporter seeking his account.

We've done far more than write. We've briefed staffers, supplied information on the technology that can be applied to solve the crisis and informed members on both sides of the aisle in both houses. They resolutely do nothing. Seveal examples. Several years ago I briefed a staffer for Representative Thomas, bringing in an inventor with technology that, when we do apply it, will make his district a production center greater than Kuwait. The staffer grew quite excited. Rep. Thomas has resolutely done nothing. My guess is he called a pal at an oil company who assured him that there was nothing to it. I wonder if it was one of the ones that has spent large sums unsuccessfully trying to back engineer and steal this particular technology.

Rep. Gephart (Sp.?) spent quite a lot of time discussing the fuel invention and technology we are working with with its inventor and clearly understood it and its benefits. But he was too busy wooing the ethanol interests to do anything about it, even though, at this point we are looking at a cheaper, cleaner fuel that would increase mileage across the board up to 25%.

With one of the patronage apointments of Rep. Hansen of Utah, a man who had obtained a masters degree in geology from Utah in a paper on producing the Utah tar sands, I spent a couple of hours, working with an inventor who has developed a technology that is the only one that will enable production of those sands (the hot water process used in Canada will not work on those sands). We briefed him completely. He seemed interested. Along the way we told him true stories of attempts by several large oil companies to steal the technology without success. At the end he warned us not to tell those stories because these companies had given to just about every member of Congress. We told him that they were true stories to illustrate our points. He repeated his mildly threatening warning. Not too long afterwards he ramrodded a subcommittee hearing on energy and, pointedly, left out anything about oil mining and surface deposit production.

I repeat, if you want leadership on doing something to solve the energy problem, don't look to Washington. The only interest here in either the Executive or the Legislative branch, is in subsidizing the problems, not solving them. With the notable exception of the Supreme Court, the same is true of the Judiciary, particularly the Federal Circuit. Witness the Talbert-Unocal litigation. It's all "yes, your bigness," and "how can we change the law to help you, Mr. Big?" Even Arthur Miller of Harvard, though he prevailed in the Supreme Court, has been unable to make a dent in the culture of helping big oil, whose reign has been far longer than that of the railroads and the big steel companies whose dominance preceded theirs. Having any industury be so dominant for so long where its premises underly foreign policy and go unchallenged is unhealthy. And don't look to the lefties and the enviro-nuts. They love to talk against big oil but have no "solution" except more and more inefficient central-command government control and scarcity. Because they are redistributionists they basically have no interest in actual solutions and the only inventor/entrepreneurs they will support are long haired guys trying to make solar powered bicycles.

You are ignoring the point. His proposal would solve nothing, it would continue the displacement of actual solutions by continuing to subsidize the large corporations in energy, ethanol, auto and other areas that are resisting and blocking the solutions. When I and others have briefed or informed those who know the President, starting back before his election, it goes through the same cycle of consultation with those who immediately assert that "there is nothing to it," while their own organizations assure that the solutions will not be implemented unless they can appropriate and control them. When interviewed several years ago by a WND reporter about one of the technologies of which I speak, an Exxon spokesperson replied that she thought that Exxon-Mobil was working on something like that. Correct, they, for several years, employed some 37 researchers trying to back engineer and appropriate the technology. They failed. The Bush administration is incapable of penetrating this culture to get at actual solutions. What oil companies seek to take without paying for unsuccessfully they are not going to tell Bush and his close advisors about.

The eecutive branch, and particularly the White House and the DOE, are locked in a culture where it is impossible for them to even see solutions, must less implement them. The preservation of the blocking institutions is more important to them than solving the problems. History is full of such behavior on the part of seemingly wsrld dominant governments.

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