Ex-Reagan Pentagon official at UNR faults Bush on Iraq

RENO -- President Bush squandered an opportunity to unite the world in a war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks and now appears bent on "unilateral" action against Iraq, an ex-Pentagon official said Thursday.

"We have a real problem on our hands as a country right now," said Lawrence Korb, assistant U.S. defense secretary for President Reagan from 1981-85. "Given the support we had after September 11, it really didn't have to come to this."

"We're sending a very, very unilateral message to the rest of the world -- that we're so powerful that you need us more than we need you. That if you don't go along, fine,"' Korb said in a speech at the University of Nevada, Reno.

"We annoyed people more than we needed to," he said.

Korb, who also worked for former President George Bush, said he sees no way to avoid war with Iraq.

"I thought it would have happened the first of March. Probably now it will be closer to the end of March," he told about 25 students and faculty in a lecture sponsored by the Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies and the National Judicial College.

"President Bush should tell the American people ... we are going to be there a long time," he said.

Korb, who describes himself as an "Eisenhower or Rockefeller Republican," is director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

A critic of excessive military spending in recent years, he was responsible for three-fourths of the defense department's budget at the Pentagon as assistant secretary for manpower, reserve affairs, installation and logistics.

"You can't win the war on terrorism yourself. You've got to dry up financial assets and you can't do that alone. You've got to arrest people before they act and that requires sharing intelligence," Korb said.

"If you have a UN sanction then it is not the U.S. against an Arab country, it's the world community."

Support from Europe and the United Nations is critical to winning a war with Iraq and in the postwar rebuilding of that country, Korb said.

"After Sept. 11, the rest of the world rallied to us. People thought Bush would change. But it didn't last long," he said.

The turning point came in Bush's State of the Union address a year ago when he labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil."

"It's one thing to say you want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. It's another to declare war on 'evil.' He startled his own State Department by declaring war against evil. That's when the rest of the world, the European allies said, 'Wait a minute,"' Korb said.

Korb criticized Democrats in Congress for "being so afraid to be (labeled) soft on defense that they won't stand up" in opposition to war.

He said anti-war protests will have their most impact in Europe partly because Bush made a "brilliant political move" at home to force Congress to vote on a war resolution before the November election.

The protests will have more influence on the Bush administration "if the war does not go well," he said. He said polls show when casualties surpass 1,000, U.S. public support for war drops below 50 percent.

'People see this as a war of choice, not necessity. They are willing to do it, provided the cost is not too great."