THIS MODERN WORLD

Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

“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,'” he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue.

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Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration’s conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised President Bush. Adelman said he was “crushed” by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Adelman also said that neoconservatism, “the idea of using our power for moral good in the world,” has been discredited with the public. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, “it’s not going to sell.”

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Perle said “you have to hold the president responsible” because he didn’t recognize “disloyalty” by some in the administration. He said the White House’s National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush’s national security .

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

More. Meanwhile in tomorrow’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, which doesn’t seem to be online yet, Ahmed Chalabi explains, “The real culprit in all of this is Wolfowitz … they chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.”

Between this:

The Labor Department announced Friday morning that the unemployment rate had fallen to 4.4 percent in October — down from 4.6 percent in September and the lowest rate since May 2001, when it was 4.3 percent.

Within hours, President Bush mocked Democrats for predicting that the administration’s tax and spending policies would wreck the economy.

“If the Democrats’ election predictions are as good as their economic predictions, we’re going to have a good day on November the seventh,” Mr. Bush said, drawing a long cheer from a crowd in Joplin, Mo., where he was campaigning for Senator Jim Talent, who is in a close race.

“The facts are in,” Mr. Bush said at another campaign stop on Friday. “The tax cuts have led to a strong and growing economy, and this morning, we got more proof of that.”

And this:

The call for job applications seemed routine; certainly nobody at corporate headquarters gave it much thought. A new candy store that would be opening in Times Square needed workers. Starting pay was $10.75 an hour.

But by midmorning yesterday, a huge, swelling, discontented crowd of job seekers was milling around the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan, not far from Macy’s in Herald Square, filling the air with curses.

The crowd put a human face on jobless statistics at a time when the city’s unemployment rate, 4.5 percent in September, was the lowest since 1988.

Several thousand people — mostly young, black and Hispanic — had shown up to apply for fewer than 200 positions, only 65 of them full-time jobs. They came, they said, because of a phrase that had leapt out of the advertisements for the jobs: “on-the-spot hiring.” But there were too many people clogging the sidewalk outside the building on Eighth Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets where the company was conducting interviews, and everyone was abruptly told to go home and mail in the job applications.

Tamika Jones, 28, a Brooklyn mother of three school-age children, looked at the faces of other disappointed job-seekers and said: “This is what unemployment looks like in New York City. I wanted to cry.”

Democrats say they are most concerned that voters will be prevented from voting by long lines or poll workers’ demanding unnecessary forms of identification.

Republicans say they are guarding against ineligible people trying to vote.

Here.

NEW YORK (AP) — Adrienne Shelly, an actress best known for her roles in the Hal Hartley films “Trust” and “The Unbelievable Truth,” was found dead in her office by her husband, her agent said Thursday.

Shelly was found about 6 p.m. Wednesday. Police said Thursday night that they are awaiting autopsy results before deciding whether to investigate the case as foul play.

An autopsy was performed Thursday, but the medical examiner’s office did not have a cause of death.

Friend of mine used to be Hal Hartley’s editor, so I met a number of people in that circle. Went out for drinks a few times with a bunch of them, including Adrienne, maybe twelve or thirteen years ago. Haven’t given them much thought in a long time, but I saw the headline on the CNN site, and had this sudden feeling it was her before I even clicked through to the obit.

Hell, if we could harness all the free-floating idiocy out there as an energy source, the future would be golden. This is unbelievable:

Sgt. Santos Cardona, 32, a military policeman from Fullerton, Calif., served in 2003 and 2004 at Abu Ghraib as a military dog handler. After pictures of Cardona using the animal to threaten Iraqis were made public, he was convicted in May of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault, the equivalent of a felony in the U.S. civilian justice system. The prosecution demanded prison time, but a military judge instead imposed a fine and reduction in rank. Though Cardona was not put behind bars, he was also required to serve 90 days of hard labor at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Before Cardona boarded a plane at Pope Air Force Base this week for the long flight to his unit’s Kuwait staging area, he told close friends and family that he dreaded returning to Iraq. One family member described him as “depressed,” though stoic about his fate. According to a close friend with whom Cardona spoke just before his departure, the soldier is fearful that he remains a marked man, forever linked to the horrors of Abu Ghraib — he appears in at least one al-Qaeda propaganda video depicting the abuse — and that he and comrades serving with him in Iraq could become targets for terrorists. To make matters worse, his 23rd MP Company has been selected to train Iraqi police, which have been the target of frequent assassination attempts and, according to US intelligence are heavily infiltrated by insurgents. Attempts to reach Cardona directly were unsuccessful.

But Cardona’s physical well-being is not the only issue of concern connected to his transfer. According to former senior U.S. military officers and others interviewed by TIME, sending a convicted abuser back to Iraq to train local police sends the wrong signal at a time when the U.S. is trying to bolster the beleagured government in Baghdad, where the horrors of Abu Ghraib are far from forgotten. “If news of this deployment is accurate, it represents appallingly bad judgment,” says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded a division in the first Gulf War. “The symbolic message perceived in Iraq will likely be that the U.S. is simply insensitive to the abuse of their prisoners.”

More.

Update: Pentagon now says it’s delaying the transfer due to the publicity.