Posted on 07/11/2004 10:48:58 AM PDT by Military Chick
Some Key Conservatives Uneasy About Bush
SCOTT LINDLAW Associated Press
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.
But anger is simmering among some conservatives.
"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.
Columbia, Missouri is indeed in Boone County.
This article is just another example of a liberal journalist snapping his fingers and telling conservatives to jump away from Bush...
Let's see how many run into the ambush eagerly asking "how high"...
Just on the idea of engineering, I've never been impressed by Japanese car makers. But the cars we are forced to buy, for lack of alternative, are 'world-sourced', today. And Dodge isn't even an American company, anymore.
At least with a bike, it can be built from the ground up. Frankly, you could do that with more than just a kit car, as well. But the bike can run $40-80. And such a custom framed and built car might be, as well.
I still try to drive American. It means buying 'classic', though. And if engineering were a problem for 'hybrid', I suspect some racers could get together and find both horsepower and full cage protection, if you went that route.
Walters appears to have a hangup about the Joos. The above words are his posted at the linked site of antiwar.com
The overwhelming policy is to continue the status-quo off-limits placement of our own natural resources while increasing our global dependence on imports. This is true for all commodities: petroleum, natural gas, steel, agricultural products, manufactured products, etc. etc. etc. Neither globalist candidate, GOP nor Democrat, is addressing this issue.
Your standard of living would go down the toilet without imports of commodities into the US. You couldn't afford to turn on your air conditioning in the summer in Vegas.
Alzheimers kicking in?
Neoconservatives (read Jews by anti-semitic trash like Halper)did no such thing.
To tell the truth, the casualty rate is far below official estimates at this point.
Not that it matters to the people to stupid to understand when to go to war.
boy, they'd better get over it, and quick!
the sunday nyt's is attacking fox news.
what the dems want is to go back to a one-party system that we had during the vietnam war, where they controlled the tv and newspapers.
with 4 supreme court justices up for grabs, conservatives had better get over their bitching about w.
I didn't know that the GOP had a French wing.
IP on AP
Stefan Halper, a senior fellow at The Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, and Jonathan Clarke, a foreign-affairs scholar at the CATO Institute, are co-authors of America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and Global Order to be published by Cambridge University Press in the summer of 2004.
Oh Please, spare me...This is nothing more than another pro-democrat puff piece. Repubs (or conservatives) are not not behind their guy, implying that the democrat has a much better chance to win.
We get these stories every election cycle. Just like on election night, the media will declare a democratic upset very early (to excite democratic voters elsewhere.) Then after the polls close on the west coast discover that they were wrong.
This story might have a little more impact if they established the credentials of the "conservative" speaker. I mean for pete's sake. The guy's served in the state dept under 2 liberal and 1 conservative administrations. That means he's a bureaucrat, it does not prove he's any sort of conservative.
You're close but no cigar.
We are in Iraq to poison the Islamic well before it poisons us.
BUMP
Not going well!
Not going well!!!
These jokers should have been around:
during the French and Indian War
during the Revolution
during St. Clair’s campaign against the Miami Confederation
during the War of 1812
during Texas War for Independence
during the War with Mexico
during the War Between the States
during the Spanish American War
during World War I
during World War II
during the Korean War
during the Vietnam War
We have overthrown the governments of two countries without losing as many solders as we lost civilians on 9-11.
"Not going well". Sounds like a bunch of commie pinko cry babies to me.
" A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 97 percent of conservative Republicans favored Bush over Kerry. But anger is simmering among some conservatives."
Well, apparently not very many.
tom hutchinson is a neighbor of mine. he DID NOT place yard signs supporting bush in 2000.
................Howard Dean's antiwar coalition gave vent to some of the anger in a sector of the public about the cost and rationale of the enterprise. His campaign showed that, even while the center under-performed, the intrinsic vitality of the American political process could produce a force for second thoughts
The combination of a public lacking international affairs awareness and of an elite center falling down on the job provided the opening for the neoconservatives to frame the post-September 11 policy process in their terms. These were terms they had developed years before, leaving them the only ones near the seat of power with a prepared set of reactions.
Making the case for the decade-old neoconservative objective of attacking Iraq required a web of deception: that Saddam Hussein had and intended to use WMDs; that Saddam protected and supported al Qaeda; and that if he were not removed these weapons might be provided to al Qaeda, which would use them against the United States.
These claims, in essence, transformed the issues at hand by turning the possible existence of these threats into "proven" facts. The process, which anthropologists call the "discursive construction of reality" uses language to create a reality different from the one prior to the use of the language.
In this case, prominent neoconservatives fashioned a dialogue, a linguistic environment, that caused many to believe the claims were rooted in fact, which was not so. The war justification thus was created by hypothesis and interpretation.
This sure sounds like Democrat BS to me.
Why do the morons at Knight Ridder consider these anti-semites to be "Key Conservatives"?
And I thought we attacked Iraq because its a war on terror and Saddam Hussein was a terrorist who was aiding other terrorists!
I'm sure glad these geniuses have enlightened me.
I agree on the 2 Johns. Their slogan should be Vote for John and you get 4 years of crap.
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