Former hawks now say they wouldn't back Iraq war

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) Richard Perle and other conservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq now say they would not have supported a war if they knew how poorly the Bush administration would handle it, Vanity Fair Magazine reported.

''I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,''' said Perle, who sat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Advisory Committee until 2004.

Kenneth Adelman, who served on the Defense Policy Board with Perle, said President George W Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others in the administration ''turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.'' Other leaders of the neoconservative movement -- which supports an aggressive foreign policy to promote democracy and was highly influential in the administration -- told the magazine that Bush did not lead decisively, or even understand or believe the speeches he delivered.

''Although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas,'' said David Frum, a former Bush speech writer.

Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives were among the earliest and most vocal proponents of an Iraq invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Many have grown increasingly critical during Bush's second term.

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