Lawyers for the prisoners have argued the new law does not give the U.S. government the power to arrest suspects overseas and imprison them indefinitely without any charges and without allowing them to challenge their detention in U.S. court.

They say a provision of the law unconstitutionally suspends the right under habeas corpus, a long-standing principle of American law, for detainees to contest their imprisonment.

Justice Department attorneys disagreed. "There is no constitutional habeas right for an enemy alien held outside the United States to challenge his detention," they said. "No actual habeas rights have been suspended."

After Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law, the Justice Department told federal district court judges they no longer have jurisdiction over some 200 cases covering more than 400 prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Department lawyers told the appeals court the new law and a similar law, the Detainee Treatment Act that Congress approved late last year, provide "an unprecedented level of judicial review for the claims of the enemy aliens held at Guantanamo."

They said the prisoners received a military proceeding, called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to determine if the detainee has been rightfully deemed to be an unlawful enemy combatant.

Those proceedings can be appealed directly to the appeals court, but the prisoners are not entitled to a sweeping factual inquiry by a federal district court judge, the lawyers said. Those cases must be dismissed.

The appeals court is expected to rule later this year or early next year, but any decision likely will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would have the final word on the law's constitutionality.

The law was prompted by a Supreme Court ruling in June that said Bush lacked the legislative authority in setting up his first system of military commissions after the September 11 attacks.

That prompted Bush to go to Congress to get authority under the new law authorizing tough interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects under a new system of military commissions.

Iran must halt its nuclear program and Syria must get its hands off Lebanon and stop shielding extremists before talks can begin, Bush said, as he met Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The United States accuses Syria and Iran of fomenting instability in Iraq and allowing insurgents to cross their borders.

Renewed debate on Iran and Syria arose as the Congressionally-mandated Iraq Study Group, charged with coming up with a new approach in the violence-wracked country, met Bush Monday before drawing up recommendations.

Veteran co-chair James Baker has said Washington should not be afraid to talk to its enemies, prompting speculation the group will endorse contacts with Iran and Syria on ending Iraq violence.

Some observers say the group may suggest de-linking Iraq from Washington's nuclear showdown with Tehran. The State Department said Monday a previous effort to discuss Iraq with Iran through its ambassador in Baghdad "didn't work out."

The high price two twin foes might demand for help in Iraq is likely to seriously complicate any talks, but foreign policy analyst Jon Alterman said he expected a US-Iran dialogue within the next two years, despite current political posturing on both sides.

"Complete chaos in Iraq is not in Iran's interests, complete American success in Iraq is not in Iran's interest either, but we are much closer to the former than the later," said Alterman of the Center For Strategic and International Studies.

Some analysts believe Tehran might require an end to pressure on its nuclear drive, and Syria could ask for more of a free hand in Lebanon in return for helping in Iraq. Either demand might be a climbdown to far for Bush.

Top Democrats emboldened by last week's rout of Republicans in congressional elections, are among those recommending a new approach.

Future Senate Foreign Relations committee chairman Joseph Biden called Sunday for a conference of regional powers similar to the Dayton talks which brought peace to former Yugoslavia.

Some observers interpreted last week's appointment of Robert Gates as the US defense secretary as a sign of a possible softening of US tone on Iran and Syria, as he once advocated dialogue with Tehran.

Britain's Observer newspaper reported Sunday Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush in a phone call it was important to involve Syria and Iran in the attempt to still spiralling violence in Iraq.

Earlier this month, Blair sent a senior official to Syria to assess its readiness to play a "constructive" role in the Middle East, sparking speculation over a possible new diplomatic opening.

But Blair toed the US line Monday, though he did say Iran should be given a "strategic choice : "they help the Middle East peace process not hinder it; they stop supporting terrorism in Lebanon or Iraq; they abide by, not flout, their international obligations.

"In that case, a new partnership is possible," he said.

Another Bush ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard earlier appeared out of step, telling ABC radio the West should talk to Iran and Syria, though it would probably not make much difference.

Though Bush ruled out talks with Iran and Syria, the White House said Monday it did not want to prejudge recommendations of the Iraq Study Group expected to report within weeks.

It might be possible for any large-scale international conference on Iraq to include Washington and its foes but preclude any direct, one-on-one contacts.

The United States has, for instance, taken part in six-party nuclear talks also involving North Korea, despite its refusal to offer two-way talk.

Rand Beers, a former US security official in both Republican and Democrat administrations said he believed a regional framework was likely for addressing Iraq problem.

"I do think there is likely to be some kind of international conference as an effort to find a way to take the outside actors and make them part of the solution instead of being neutral or part of the problem," Beers said.

"You mean we're actually going to deal with these people," he thought to himself. He's the chief proponent of the radical unitary-executive theory, which claims the president can do anything he wants, especially in times of war -- declared, or just proclaimed, as the Busheviks prefer to do.

Cheney cued Bush on the idea of a monarchical presidency with no accountability to Congress, the courts or, of course, the people. Their systematic trampling on constitutionally protected rights, their addiction to government secrecy and their passion for all things unilateral spring from this despotic, un-American notion.

Cheney is already nostalgic for the wonderfully subordinate legislative branch departing Senate Majority Leader Bill "Dirty Hands" Frist and House Speaker Denny "What Page?" Hastert dutifully provided. The hos on the Hill performed every important trick the Johns in the White House solicited.

Frist and Hastert deserve a disgraceful little footnote in history for presiding over the most fiscally irresponsible Congress in memory, one that entirely abrogated its oversight responsibilities and became totally subservient to the executive branch in exchange for Bush's support for their greedy pork-barrel projects.

After spending months smearing the Democrats as terrorist-coddlers and cowards, Bush shrugged off his gutter tactics as "just politics." What the hell. It's OK to accuse your opponents of ignoring national security, favoring terrorists and being surrender monkeys for Osama bin Laden. In Bush's perverted view of public life, that's just routine behavior, and now, as he cavalierly noted, "the election is over. It's time to move on."

Bush's own post-election analysis was an insult to the American people. They just don't understand how wise he is and how they should respect his sparkling leadership. "I thought when it was all said and done," Bush whined at a news conference, "the American people would understand the importance of taxes and understand the importance of security."

Those ignorant buffoons. They don't understand why borrowing money to give tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and burdening our children with unconscionable debt is such a swell plan.

Those same nincompoops don't understand why invading Iraq -- a nation which posed no threat to our security -- killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process, at a cost of $8 billion a month, creating and fostering a new generation of terrorists, and alienating the rest of the world is not a fabulous strategy to make our nation more secure. Come on, people, wake up and understand.

Cheney is less resilient than Bush and he is fuming over the sacking of his friend and mentor, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This is the first major decision Bush has made without big Dick's approval, and the veep is angry and resentful.

Rumsfeld resorted to his signature arrogance and condescension, even as he was forced to walk the plank. Iraq is a "little-understood, unfamiliar war," he huffed. What the most incompetent and bull-headed military leader in modern times crafted is simply too "complex for people to comprehend."

The American people understand and comprehend Bush and Rumsfeld's war. They, at long last, understand what a horrible blunder invading Iraq was, and recognize those who sold it lied and created an intractable mess. All that remains is how tragic the extrication will be.

Losing your delusional identical twin and partner in incompetence is painful. Cheney will spend the rest of his term locked in the bat cave, going on drinking-hunting trips with his rich pals and counting his money from Halliburton dividends.

He and Rummy have neighboring retirement homes on Maryland's eastern shore, where they will spend their time sipping scotch, sharing war stories and rationalizing their failures and the horrors they brought the nation and the world. They will never forgive Bush for Rumsfeld's ignominious departure.

But Rummy may be hiding from the sheriff, the jaws of justice snapping at his heels. Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed a complaint, and a German prosecutor is considering criminal charges against Rumsfeld. He's accused of personally approving torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the American-run gulag in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

German law recognizes jurisdiction for war crimes and human rights abuses. Rumsfeld may find himself in the same boat as former Chilean dictator Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Pinochet ordered thousands of murders, kidnappings and the torture of his political rivals during the decades of his reign of terror. Kissinger's hands are bloody for ordering the assassination of a Chilean military leader, which paved the way for Pinochet's coup.

Pinochet has already been charged in Spain, but his age is sparing him the prosecution and prison he deserves. Kissinger won't travel to several countries, fearing prosecutors with memories will slap him with arrest warrants. The German prosecutor may also be considering criminal charges against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former CIA director George Tenet for their roles in the torture and abuse programs. Whatever crimes their minions may have committed, Bush and Cheney are even more culpable.

It was not at all surprising that Bush lied through his teeth when -- just a week before firing him -- he told reporters Rumsfeld was doing a "fantastic job" and he planned to keep him on through the remainder of his term. He said this while lining up Rumsfeld's named successor, former CIA director Robert Gates, for the job.

The lie, which Bush admitted, was true to his mendacious mind. He justified the naked deception as noble in purpose, saying he didn't want to "inject a major decision about this war in the final days of the campaign."

When I heard it, I thought, well, finally one of the network types would label what Bush did as the lie it was. "President Bush lied when he said he intended to keep Donald Rumsfeld on as defense secretary for the remainder of his term, but the president said he did so for a good reason." Those are truthful words. ABC's Charles Gibson, NBC's Brian Williams and CBS's Katie Couric could have delivered them with ease. But the mainstream media cowards balked again, choosing to regurgitate the White House talking points and Bush's claim that he wants a "bipartisan" approach to Iraq and other issues.

The Democrats have a great responsibility to bring some sanity and decency to our national public discourse that the Busheviks and their media allies have so damaged.

Some advice for the Democrats:

Jack Murtha should be picked as the Democratic majority leader in the House, not his rival Steny Hoyer. Murtha's dramatic defection and criticism of the war was a turning point that roused public opinion. He is frank, and his military credentials are impeccable. Hoyer is far too cozy with lobbyists and corporate interests.

Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden will chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and he's already announced there will be hearings on the Iraq fiasco. That's a good thing. The problem is, the always-verbose, often-pompous Biden will conduct the hearings.

I suggest the first witnesses ought to be Biden himself and New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. They can testify under oath why they voted for the war in Iraq in the first place, a terrible mistake none of them has acknowledged so far, and why they insist the issue is the way the war is being conducted, not the invasion and the stupid strategy and aggression they authorized.

Their usual argument is that they "trusted" Bush would exhaust all other means short of war. Their real reason was covering their political hides. "We're tough on terror, too" they branded themselves, even when the facts didn't support their stance.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., who will take over the Senate Intelligence Committee from that despicable coverup artist Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., should quickly wrap up the panel's investigation of the administration's use and manipulation of pre-war intelligence. The task should take about one week. The conclusion will be simple: George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their confederates twisted, shaped and distorted government intelligence reports to support their preconceived notion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed a threat to our national security.

They lied to draw our nation into a war that had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks. The invasion was part of a bizarre plan the neocon nuts hatched long before bin Laden's mass murder. Reshape the Middle East. Assert American supremacy in the region. Make Israel more secure. American volunteers -- none named Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld -- would die for the experiment.

Iraq's oil was already in their crosshairs. The rich bin Laden, driven by his own Wahhabi fanaticism, the Saudi royal family's state religion, just happened to walk into their game and gave them the bloody shirt to wave they needed for a war that otherwise would have been impossible to sell.

Nancy Pelosi, our next speaker of the House, had the good sense to vote against the war. She is a bright, practical politician and the first woman and Italian-American to lead a branch of our government.

Pelosi has a great challenge, which she is certainly capable of handing. She has an easy act to follow. She will begin cleaning up the corruption and thuggery the Republicans brought to the House. Her toughest task, though, may be trying to teach all those WASP boys in the executive branch what good government and decency are all about.

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net.

On that day six years ago, we spoke too of his father, the first President Bush, and W. had tears in his eyes. But how cruel is life! For in his six years in the presidency, the younger Bush has moved inexorably, and until now effectively, to destroy his father's legacy by wiping out just about everything that the Eastern Establishment Bushes believed in and painstakingly built.

So now, James Baker III is moving back into Washington, his Baker Commission virtually the only hope for ending the Iraq war and returning America to its traditional place of respect in the world. We can see why he has so often been called the "velvet hammer": Baker is unquestionably the only American statesman of the last five administrations who combines brilliant cunning, supreme common sense and uncommon personal decency.

When he and his co-chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, release their report from the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group in December, what rabbits will they pull out of their hats? What foreign policy tactics and truth SHOULD they pull out of their hats?

There are a few things we already know from leaks and speculation about their carefully guarded work: 1) The report will stress stability in Iraq rather than democracy; 2) it will set up appropriate systems for talking to Iran and Syria; 3) members will not advise for partition of the three Iraqi groups (Kurd, Shiite, Sunni); 4) they will seriously consider the idea of "redeploy and contain," moving American troops into surrounding countries to be used only in emergencies; 5) and they might advise the "stability first" idea, which would focus the United States on stabilizing Baghdad and turning it into a model for the rest of the country.

Jim Baker, as secretary of state under Father Bush, was not only instrumental in freeing Eastern Europe, in allowing the Soviet Union to collapse with some dignity, and in judiciously conducting the Gulf War of 1991, but he was intimately involved in attempting to bring peace to Israel/Palestine. It was Baker who designed, oversaw and carried to creative fruition the Madrid Conference in 1991, which made possible the 1993 Oslo Accords -- which nearly resulted in peace between the Israelis and Palestinians over five years in the mid '90s.

But President George W. Bush has been so enamored of his war-making capacities and so enchanted by the demands of the Israeli lobby that the hatred between those two peoples has festered almost to civil war there.

The Baker Commission needs above all to remove us from the singularity of Iraq, to move to re-establish American justice and power in the Middle East by convincing the moderate Arab regimes that we will tackle -- and solve -- the Palestinian problem. We need to alter the perception of "America" today as a country obsessed with Iraq, and return it to its historical fair negotiator role.

This would mean putting pressures on the Palestinians and Israelis alike -- and Jim Baker is practically the only one who could and would be tough enough to do it. (Oh yes, I know, you've heard this for YEARS -- that doesn't make it any less true.)

Ironically, despite the seeming hopelessness of the Iraq situation, many voices in the Middle East still support an Israeli/Palestinian settlement. The Saudi proposal of March 2002, signed by 22 Arab states -- calling for the two states to fully recognize each other, for a workable Palestinian state to be formed, and for a return to the pre-1967 borders -- is still viable. In only the last few weeks, Egypt, Jordan, Germany and Great Britain have called, again, for such a peace process. All it needs is for a serious American push.

With Baker, perhaps there is a chance to return to the centrist, moral, politically savvy values of Father Bush's administration, in place of the hubristic, imperialistic, amoral, politically ignorant values that "Sonny," as many of the senior Bush's generation now refer to the president, has imposed upon the country.

Think of the elegant words that Father Bush gave us earlier this year at a celebration of the uniting of the two Germanys, and you'll see where we came from -- and what we must return to.

"We rose above the recriminations of the past," he said, "and broke a chain of human discontent and resolved our affairs not with rifles but with reason. For once, mankind did not fall back on a primeval reflex for violence, but instead asserted the 'better angels' of human nature."

In the name of the father ... amen.

Ask thy father, and he will show thee: advice that, at long last, George W. Bush seems to be taking. Last week the president lost both houses of Congress and 16 more Americans died in Iraq, bringing the U.S. death toll to 2,844, with little discernible progress in sight. The war there has now lasted 44 months, the amount of time that elapsed between Pearl Harbor and VJ Day.

In a conference room filled with commemorative shotguns in his Houston offices last Wednesday, the father settled in to watch his son's post-election press conference on TV. Lunching on pizza, Bush Senior listened as George W. Bush said the loss of Congress was a "thumping," promised to "work with" a commission on Iraq chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, and announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was resigning. Within two hours the president was in the Oval Office with Rumsfeld and his replacement: Robert M. Gates, Bush Senior's CIA director and the president of Texas A&M University, the home of Bush 41's presidential library.

In Houston the phones started ringing, and Bush 41 staffers were pulled away from their pizza. Reporters were calling and e-mailing: would 41 talk about 43's shake-up? The answer was no, though two perfunctory statements were issued (one for the College Station Eagle and one, as the former president put it, "for everybody else"). Still, the reality spoke for itself. Dad's team was back-a remarkable course correction in the political life of the son and, quite possibly, in the life of the nation.

The American people, as politicians like to say, spoke last week-and spoke in no uncertain terms. The 2006 vote does not suggest an eagerness for a sharp left turn. It seems, rather, to be a plea for a shift from the hard right of the neoconservatives to the center represented by the old man in Houston. The re-emergence of Iraq Study Group voices such as Baker, Gates and Alan Simpson-all longtime friends of Bush Senior-is not unlike the entrance of Fortinbras at the conclusion of "Hamlet." These are 41's men, and the removal of Rumsfeld-an ancient rival of Bush Senior's from the Ford days-is a move toward the broad middle. The apparent triumph of pragmatism over ideology on Iraq was welcome news, at least to the public. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 67 percent favor Bush Senior's internationalist approach to foreign policy over his son's more unilateral course.

Did 41 help bring Gates to the Pentagon? The White House denies it, but, as a Bush friend told NEWSWEEK, "his fingerprints are all over this." (The friend refused to be identified for fear of alienating the family.) Given the mists of secrecy that envelop the 41-43 relationship, it is striking that the broad Bush circle believes he had a hand in the Rumsfeld succession: as an old CIA director, 41 rarely leaves any clues at all.

What the two Bushes discuss has long been a subject of endless guesswork. "In my experience, the two men spent most of their time talking about family matters, about sports, about fishing," former White House chief of staff Andy Card told NEWSWEEK. "They spoke to each other much more as father and son rather than as president and former president." Still, politics and policy do come up. "It would be wrong to assume that they never discuss Iraq, the state of play in the world and some personalities," Card said. "But it would also be wrong to assume that they discuss these things all the time. They are mutually deferential to one another."

The Bush family psychodrama is the stuff of perennial speculation but little information, since the two people who know the most about it-the father and the son-speak of it so infrequently. Yet its complexity, its blend of love and rivalry, is rich analytical territory. (Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, an unlikely e-mail pal of 41's, has spent so much time contemplating the generational drama that she ultimately published an excellent book on the topic, "Bushworld"; it ran to 544 pages.) In perhaps the most revealing on-the-record remark about their relationship made by either man, the son once told Bob Woodward that his father is "the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

As the war has gone badly and the years have ticked by-2003, 2004, 2005 and now much of 2006-the senior President Bush, the man who managed to capture just 37 percent of the vote in 1992, has grown in stature. Raising taxes and capping domestic spending in 1990, refusing to exceed the United Nations mandate after expelling Saddam from Kuwait, and deftly managing the end of the cold war and the reunification of Germany loom ever larger. Given the midterm reaction to the son's inattention to alliances and to the details of postwar Iraq, it is clear that many Americans are nostalgic for the skills and sensibility the first President Bush brought to the Oval Office-a reversal of historical fortune that has come, sadly for the father, at the expense of his son.

In terms of foreign policy, it is true that 41 was more a realist than an ideologue-the prose to Reagan's cold-war poetry. And it is also true that the son would prefer to be remembered not as a second George Bush but as a second Gipper-a big, transformative president who confronted a mortal threat to the nation with steely soul and soaring words. Hence, it seems, the innate appeal of the neoconservative argument, advanced in part by Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney (a 41 figure who got neocon religion after 9/11), to strike Iraq in a noble bid to transform the Middle East.

In classical terms, the tragic figure is someone whose inherent flaws are evident from the beginning. In the wake of September 11, we knew our president's virtues. He was resolute, disdainful of dissent; like his hero Winston Churchill, Bush dismissed critics he believes spin around with "the alacrity of squirrels." But we also knew Bush's vices. Resolution can harden into stubbornness; a refusal to listen to criticism can breed isolation.

Hindsight, of course, is a luxury, and life often appears clearer in retrospect than it does at the time, in the arena. The bet Bush has made in the Middle East is a grand one, and history is made, and people are freed, by grand gambles. The American Founders gambled with Britain in 1776; Churchill gambled with Germany in 1940; Reagan gambled with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The line between triumph and tragedy is a thin one, and things may yet work out.

Or so we must believe. Faith is important to the Bushes, always has been, and to return to the Bible the president knows so well, there is a New Testament verse familiar to patrician politicians from Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin to Prescott and George H.W. Bush: "To whom much is given," the Scriptures say, "much is expected." Much has been given to George W. Bush, and now, in the twilight of his term, as his father's men step in, he has been given another great gift: one more chance to set things right.

"I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said 'Should we go into Iraq?' 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,' " Perle said, according to interview excerpts released Friday by the magazine.

Perle's about-face is the latest in a series of war recriminations by neoconservatives, many of whom blame Iraq's spiraling violence on the administration's management of the postwar stabilization effort.

Others interviewed for the article included former Bush speechwriter David Frum and former Reagan administration official Kenneth L. Adelman.

Perle's prominent advocacy of invasion after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - and his close relationship with the war's top architects, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy Defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the former Pentagon policy chief - makes his reversal particularly noteworthy.

Perle told Vanity Fair he did not anticipate the "depravity" currently underway in Iraq, saying, "The levels of brutality we've seen are truly horrifying."

He said "huge mistakes" had been made in the management of the war, and he blamed disloyalty among top Bush administration officials for a failure to get the policy correct.

"The decisions did not get made that should have been," he said.

He continued: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible....

"I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Although the excerpts do not show who Perle blames for disloyalty or mismanagement, he appears to lay the blame at the feet of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the military leaders who put together the war plan.

"Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad," he said.

"I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

The excerpts include quotes from other neoconservatives who have turned against the war, including Adelman, a longtime friend of Rumsfeld who has received classified Pentagon briefings on the war as recently as March, according to a recent book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Vanity Fair quotes Adelman as saying that though he still believes the reasons for going to war were right, the invasion should not have occurred because the goals were unachievable. He called Bush's national security advisors "among the most incompetent teams" in the post-World War II era, adding he was particularly let down by Rumsfeld: "I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance."

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat-an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"-is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' 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.' ... I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"-starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They 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."

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself-what he defines as "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. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." 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."

I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.

I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.

Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "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."

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."

Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer-three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "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."

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.... I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.... The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.