U.S. conservative figures criticize Bush's Iraq policy

Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, two prominent conservative figures from the camp of U.S. President George W. Bush, strongly criticized Bush's Iraq policy in interviews of the Vanity Fair in its coming January issue, U.S. media reported Saturday.

Perle, who once chaired the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and strongly advocated the invasion of Iraq, said the dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy in Iraq a disaster.

"I probably would have said, 'let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'" Perle said.

"At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible," Perle said.

Adelman also strong criticized the handling of Iraq's postwar reconstruction by Bush's national security team.

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional," Adelman said.

Although facing strong criticism from Democrats and his own Republican camp, Bush vowed on Saturday that the United States will not retreat from Iraq.

Opinion polls have found that a majority of Americans disapprove the way that the Bush administration is handling the Iraq conflict and Bush's approval rating has slipped to 35 percent.

Source: Xinhua