Juan Cole says Bush is deluded if he really thinks his election "victory" (remember Ohio) is a mandate for continued military adventurism. Polls showed most voters did not want further attacks on countries like Syria and Iran. Cole says that based on this "mandate", Bush should have sacked Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. His views on Feith are worth repeating:
Feith is so much of a security risk because of his long ties to the Likud Party in Israel that for a while the Pentagon brass was refusing to share classified documents with his office. One of his subordinates is under investigation by the FBI for turning confidential Pentagon policy documents over to an official in the Israeli embassy via the pro-Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC. Feith had signed on to a 1996 policy paper for Likud party politician Benyamin Netanyahu that called for a war against Iraq for Israeli security purposes and openly opposed the Oslo peace process, which could have resolved the festering Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Feith's Office of Special Plans, its personnel drawn in part from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, cherry-picked intelligence on Saddam's Iraq to make an exaggerated and unfounded case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction programs and an operational link to al-Qaeda.
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