Once again, US President George W. Bush may have misjudged the extent of Republican resistance to one of his decisions. His nomination of a four-star general to serve as CIA director has drawn complaints from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.
The administration's shake-up, under way since late March, was expected to improve White House dealings with Congress. Yet Bush's selection of Air Force General Michael Hayden to head the troubled spy agency, three days after he announced the resignation of Porter Goss, seems to have caught some top Republicans by surprise.
That includes Representative Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who said Hayden "is the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time."
"We need intelligence reform but I think this is such a fundamental step, where we're going to have every single major intelligence agency under the control of the military, I felt I have to stand up and say I can't go that way," Hoekstra said on Tuesday. "We need a balanced perspective in the intelligence community to drive military intelligence and drive civilian intelligence."
Grumbles
Bush defended his choice against such criticism, saying Hayden was "the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history." And most top Republicans voiced support for the nomination.
But grumbling in some Republican quarters seemed likely to persist, fueled in part by their concern over Bush's declining approval ratings.
Those ratings -- at 33 percent in a recent AP-Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency -- have emboldened Republicans to speak out when they don't agree with the president, something that didn't happen during Bush's first term.
Congressional Republicans have been battered by a string of White House woes.
These include the fumbled handling of Hurricane Katrina; unhappiness about Iraq; opposition to the now-abandoned Dubai ports deal; the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court; Bush's inability to achieve the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, an overhaul of Social Security, and the uproar over a secret eavesdropping program in the war on terrorism.
The fact that Hayden oversaw the surveillance program as director of the National Security Agency (NSA) only keeps the controversy alive, with questions over it likely to figure prominently at his Senate confirmation hearings. He headed the NSA from 1999 to last year.
"If he interprets the law as he appears to be interpreting it, I think it's bad for the country to have the chief of intelligence having telephones in the United States monitored without somebody else approving it," said retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, who was CIA chief during the Carter administration.
Otherwise, Turner characterized Hayden as "very qualified and very capable" and said he personally has no problems with giving the civilian job to an active military officer.
Turner was an admiral when he headed the CIA, a fact administration officials pointed to on Monday in defense of Bush's choice.
Still, with public support for the war in Iraq eroding and the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld moving more and more into intelligence-gathering activities, the naming of an active four-star general raised concerns in Congress and with civil-liberties groups.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, suggested Hayden consider resigning from the Air Force and "put to rest questions about whether an active duty military officer should lead the CIA at this time."
But Hoekstra said on Tuesday that would not satisfy his concerns.
"This is not about the clothes Mike Hayden is going to wear into the office at the CIA," Hoekstra said on NBC's Today show. "It's about the lens he sees the world through. For 35 years he's looked at the world through the lens of the military. That's not going to go away. We need someone looking at the world through the lens of a civilian background."
Demoralized
National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who oversees the CIA and 15 other spy agencies, said Hayden had no plans to retire from the military and called him "a very, very independent-minded" individual who wouldn't bow to any Pentagon pressure.
The criticism of Bush's CIA choice, at least initially, did not appear deep enough to put Hayden's confirmation chances in serious jeopardy. But it seemed certain to yield contentious confirmation hearings -- and likely to widen the rift between the White House and some members of his own party on Capitol Hill.
If confirmed, Hayden faces an even more daunting challenge in trying to revive the embattled agency.
"He's got a massive human problem. People are demoralized. People are leaving the agency," said James Lewis, a former career diplomat familiar with intelligence issues who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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