Friction/Fiction

fiction?

Rice on defensive over strength of U.S. forces
Forced to defend prewar planning after Powell raises issue of troop levels

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12563754/



Updated: 7:41 p.m. ET April 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic — Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.

For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of an in-house dissenter going public.
On Rice’s mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.

Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

He said he advised Bush before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to send more troops to Iraq, but that the administration did not follow his recommendation.

Journey through the pastRice, Bush’s national security adviser during the run-up to the war, neither confirmed nor denied Powell’s assertion. But she spent a good part of her appearances on three Sunday talk shows reaching into the past to defend the White House, which is trying to highlight the positive to a public increasingly skeptical in this election year of the president’s conduct of the war and concerned about the large U.S. military presence.

“I don’t remember specifically what Secretary Powell may be referring to, but I’m quite certain that there were lots of discussions about how best to fulfill the mission that we went into Iraq,” Rice said.

“And I have no doubt that all of this was taken into consideration. But that when it came down to it, the president listens to his military advisers who were to execute the plan,” she told CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Powell, in an interview broadcast Sunday in London, said he gave the advice to now retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who developed and executed the Iraq invasion plan, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld while the president was present.

Powell: ‘I made case’ for more troops“I made the case to General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld before the president that I was not sure we had enough troops,” Powell said in an interview on Britain’s ITV television. “The case was made, it was listened to, it was considered. ... A judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate.”

In an interview with AARP The Magazine released Sunday, Powell did not say what advice he gave Bush about whether to go to war. Known to be less hawkish than Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and some other presidential advisers, Powell implied he had been more cautious.
“The decisions that were made were not made by me or Mr. Cheney or Rumsfeld. They were made by the president of the United States,” he said.

“And my responsibility was to tell him what I thought. And if others were going in at different times and telling him different things, it was his decision to decide whether he wanted to listen to that person or somebody else.”

Rice: Bush ‘listened’ to all concerned Rice said

Bush “listened to the advice of his advisers and ultimately, he listened to the advice of his commanders, the people who actually had to execute the war plan. And he listened to them several times,” she told ABC’s “This Week.”

“When the war plan was put together, it was put together, also, with consideration of what would happen after Saddam Hussein was actually overthrown,” Rice said.

In January, Pentagon officials acknowledged that Paul Bremer, the senior U.S. official in Iraq during the first year of the war, told Rumsfeld in May 2004 that a far larger number of U.S. troops were needed to effectively fight the insurgency, but his advice was rejected. Bremer said his memo to Rumsfeld suggested 500,000 troops were needed — more than three times the number there at the time.

Rice calls for looking forward

“There will be time to go back and look at those days of the war and, after the war, to examine what went right and what went wrong,” Rice said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“But the goal and the purpose now is to make certain that we take advantage of what is now a very good movement forward on the political front to help this Iraqi government,” she said.
Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Gulf War and is known for his belief in deploying decisive force with a clear exit strategy in any conflict.

“The president’s military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate; they may still feel that years later. Some of us don’t. I don’t,” Powell said. “In my perspective, I would have preferred more troops, but you know, this conflict is not over.”

“At the time, the president was listening to those who were supposed to be providing him with military advice,” Powell said. “They were anticipating a different kind of immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad; it turned out to be not exactly as they had anticipated.”

Rumsfeld has rejected criticism that he sent too few U.S. troops to Iraq, saying that Franks and generals who oversaw the campaign’s planning had determined the overall number of troops, and that he and Bush agreed with them. The recommendation of senior military commanders at the time was about 145,000 troops.

friction?

A Wave's First Strike

By Eugene RobinsonTuesday, May 2, 2006; Page A21


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050101276.html


The construction sites I drove past on my way to work yesterday were abnormally quiet, almost tranquil, without the usual bustle of organized chaos. Every once in a while, a crane indolently traced its arc; every once in a while, a truck arrived or departed. But the basic activity involved in putting up an office building -- picking stuff up and carrying it from here, where the crane or the trucks left it, to there, where it's needed -- went largely undone.

In Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, long a magnet for Latino immigrants, it felt almost like a Sunday morning. Few people were out and about, and only about half the local businesses were open. On the padlocked doors of a pharmacy, a dental clinic, a barbershop, a wire transfer office where immigrants send money home to their families, and other offices were taped identical fliers, with a notice in Spanish and English: "We will be closed on Monday May 1st in support of the Latino national strike."

Two middle-aged women who identified themselves as Maria and Sonia (neither would give a last name) strolled past, pointing out all the closed businesses. "This action is a good idea, a very good idea, because we have to support all the people who are here without papers," said Maria, who, like her friend, is from El Salvador. "We came here to work hard, not to harm anyone. Salvadorans are hard workers. We're not criminals."

All morning local Spanish-language radio hummed with urgent news and advice. There would be a demonstration in the afternoon at Malcolm X Park. This was to be a day of peaceful solidarity. No one should jeopardize his or her job; if you have to go to work, join the demonstration later.

It's too early to judge the impact of yesterday's nationwide "Day Without Immigrants" protest, but it's past time to recognize that something important is happening -- something that goes beyond the debate on Capitol Hill about immigration reform. At this point it's harder to say just what this nascent Latino movement is than to point out what it is not. It's certainly not a monolith. There has been spirited internal debate, for example, over "Nuestro Himno," the Spanish-language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that was released by an all-star chorus of Latino recording artists last week. Some heard a genuine expression of patriotism; others heard an unnecessary and unwise provocation.

Maybe it was neither. Maybe "Nuestro Himno" was a step in forging and tempering a stronger pan-Latino identity and political consciousness. Black people have skin color as a factor to unite us; Latinos, who can be of any race, have Spanish.

But let me be clear: We can also say that the movement whose birth we are witnessing is not a clone or even a descendant of the civil rights movement that won for African Americans our place in this society. There's just no way to compare a group of people whose ancestors were brought here in chains, forced to work as slaves and then systematically classified as second-class citizens for more than a century with another group of people, however hard-working or well-meaning, who came to the United States voluntarily.

That said, I am convinced that the nation's two biggest minorities are natural allies, not rivals, and that a crucial task over the coming months and years will be to find ways for African Americans and Latinos to work together. Our histories may be different, but we have at least one big thing -- discrimination -- in common.

For the two groups to fight over low-skilled, low-wage jobs would be a tragic waste of time and effort. The issue is how both African Americans and Latinos can claim a fair share of this nation's vast wealth and opportunity, not how we can wrestle the scraps from one another. The issue is who gets to occupy the corner office during working hours, not who gets to clean it at night.
Congress may do something reasonable on immigration, giving the estimated 12 million people already here without papers a chance to become citizens or legal residents, but there's no guarantee. It may be that there's no common ground among the president, the House and the Senate -- at least not in an election year. But if you take the long view, I'm not sure that Capitol Hill is where the real news is happening.

Yesterday the news was happening at construction sites, where it was demonstrated that steel, lumber and glass will not move from here to there on their own.