"Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."

Former Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman, a prominent neoconservative, had authored an op-ed piece in the April 10, 2003 Washington Post entitled "Cake Walk Revisited," gloating over what appeared to be a quick victory in Iraq and reminding readers that, 14 months earlier, he had written that the war would be a "Cake Walk."

Cheney read the article and congratulated Adelman on his "clever column," which, he said, "really demolished them." Cheney and his wife, Lynne, invited the Adelmans to join the Cheneys on April 13 for a "small private dinner" with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Adelman was so happy that he burst into tears at the door of the vice president's residence that Sunday. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him. "We're all together," Cheney said. "There should be no protocol; 'let's just talk.'"

Wolfowitz proceeded to embark on a long review of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. "Hold it, hold it," Adelman interjected. "Let's talk about this Gulf war. I have been blown away by how determined the president is. The war has been awesome."

Adelman said he had been "worried to death that there would be no war as time went on and support seemed to wane."

"Yes," agreed the vice president. "And it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead...This guy was just totally different," Cheney said. "He just decided here's what I want to do and I'm going to do it."

Writes Woodward, "It was a pretty amazing accomplishment, they all agreed, particularly given the opposition to the war. Here was Brent Scowcroft, the pillar of the establishment foreign policy, widely seen as a surrogate for the president's father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations."

Talk turned to the current secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, and there were chuckles around the table. Cheney and Wolfowitz agreed that, as Cheney put it, Powell "was someone who just followed his poll ratings and bragged about his popularity. He sure likes to be popular. Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do." (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 30, 2004)

"The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."

Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms control official who is close to top Bush military officials and serves on a Pentagon advisory panel, said these weapons are likeliest to be found near Tikrit and Baghdad, "because they're the most protected places with the best troops."

"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction," Adelman said, though he acknowledged some surprise that they have not been used yet. "One thing we may find is Saddam Hussein ordered them to be used and soldiers didn't follow the orders. The threat of use goes down every day because adherence to orders goes down."

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That's what the neocons wanted, and that's what they got. The rest is details.

The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

"the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation.

"The president has made clear what his objective is and that's victory in Iraq. We're full speed ahead on that...It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."