Lugar urges Bush to control policy team

WASHINGTON -- A key Republican legislator urged President Bush yesterday to take control of his fractious foreign policy team and plans for Iraq's reconstruction, as one Democrat deepened his criticism of the administration's arguments for going to war.

"The president has to be president," Senator Richard G. Lugar, a Republican of Indiana who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program. "That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries" of state and defense. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice "cannot carry that burden alone," he added.

Lugar said that in the first week of the administration's campaign to explain its Iraq policy and highlight its achievements, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Rice all gave speeches whose tones "was distinctly different" and that senators were rightly concerned about "the strength, the coherence of our policies."

Lugar predicted that Iraq's reconstruction would cost $50 billion more than the $87 billion the White House is seeking from Congress for military and reconstruction efforts and that the duration of US involvement in Iraq "may be comparable to Bosnia," where US and European peacekeepers are near the eighth year of deployment.

Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said yesterday he was "inclined not to" vote for the administration's $87 billion request and criticized Bush for "haphazard, shotgun, shoot-from-the-hip diplomacy."

Kerry, who voted for the congressional resolution authorizing war, stepped up his attacks on Bush's decision to go to war. He said some of the administration's prewar contentions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "misled America."

"They told us there were aerial vehicles" to deliver Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said on ABC's "This Week" news program. "They weren't there. They told us they had a 45-minute deployment period for weapons of mass destruction. That wasn't true. They told us they were on the road to nuclear weaponization. That was not true."

Bush "ought to apologize . . . because what they've done now is launch a PR campaign instead of a real policy," Kerry said. "We need to go to the United Nations more humbly, more directly, more honestly, solicit help in a way that brings the United Nations into this effort, or you are going to continue to see bomb after bomb after bomb."

Kerry also derided the administration's effort to portray the current efforts in Iraq as international in nature. "We have a fraudulent coalition," he said. "It's a few people here, a few people there. It's basically the British, and most fundamentally, the United States of America.

"This administration has alienated people all across this planet. They have . . . made America less safe."

Lugar and the ranking member of the committee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, predicted narrow approval of the administration's $87 billion request. But both said the administration had to improve its plan for turning over power to Iraqis, and Lugar added that it should make "a genuine attempt" to persuade allies, including "Germany, France, Russia, and China" to join the peacekeeping effort.

Divisions over Iraq policy reflect larger ideological differences within Bush's national security team. Cheney and Rumsfeld have pursued more hard-line unilateralist approaches to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, while Powell favors dialogue and greater efforts to include allies.

Last week, with rising concerns about the direction and public perception of the Iraq reconstruction project, the White House put Rice in charge of the effort, possibly at the expense of the Defense Department, which had been running the show.