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Ex-security adviser calls Iraq 'failing venture'

WASHINGTON - The national security adviser under the first President Bush says the current president acted contemptuously toward NATO and Europe after Sept. 11 and is trying to cooperate now out of desperation to "rescue a failing venture" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brent Scowcroft, a mentor to the current national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also said in an interview published in England that Bush is inordinately influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger," Scowcroft told London's Financial Times. "I think the president is mesmerized."

Scowcroft said the Bush administration's "unilateralist" position was partly responsible for the decline of the trans-Atlantic relationship.

Although slightly diminished since then, the unilateralist policies remain fundamentally little changed, Scowcroft said. Recent overtures to cooperate in Afghanistan and Iraq with the United Nations and NATO were "as much an act of desperation as anything else ... to rescue a failing venture."

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The grandfather of an Army Reserve soldier whose platoon refused to deliver supplies in Iraq said his grandson told him Saturday that he and other soldiers had been detained by military authorities but were released.

Meanwhile, military officials said commanders reassigned five members of the unit.

Some in the platoon had told relatives they refused to deliver tainted helicopter fuel in poorly maintained vehicles by traveling a dangerous supply route without an armed escort.

The Army is investigating up to 19 members of the platoon, which is part of the 343rd Quartermaster Company based in Rock Hill, S.C. The unit delivers food, water and fuel on trucks in combat zones. A criminal inquiry was expected.

Clerics in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah said they would resume peace talks with the government if U.S. forces suspended attacks. U.S. jets again struck the city.

More than 20 armed men raided a police station in Rawah, some 200 miles west of Baghdad, taking six officers hostage, said witness Fakhry Mohammed Ali, 35. The gunmen released the policemen but blew up the station, he said.

Also in Rawah, three Iraqi drivers transporting oil to an American base were kidnapped and their tankers set ablaze, Ali said.