Now the deputy defense secretary and his fellow neoconservatives are on the defensive. They are battling a growing crowd of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world as the Bush administration�s credibility�and its assumptions�are tested as never before. In Iraq, after another week in which U.S. troops died and got into fierce fire fights, elements of more than half of America�s Army divisions are tied down. Some U.S. officials have begun muttering the dreaded Q word�quagmire, a term Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had mocked on a visit to Baghdad in the days just after the three-week war. In the Mideast, the hard-liners� move to replace Yasir Arafat with the moderate Mahmoud Abbas�and to ignore the conflict until after the Iraq war�has touched off a new cycle of violence that stunned even the White House in its savagery. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that �the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.� In the face of a possible congressional probe into why Saddam Hussein�s weapons of mass destruction have not been found, two Pentagon neocons, Doug Feith and Bill Luti, sought earlier this month to identify themselves with, of all people, Bill Clinton. In a fumbling news conference, they insisted that their intel squared with the previous administration�s.

QUESTIONS ON U.S. CREDIBILITY
Fairly or not, Paul Wolfowitz has become a lightning rod for much of this criticism, and to �cry Wolfowitz� has already become a catchphrase for the pressing questions about U.S. credibility. At a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Wolfowitz�always a striking presence with his thick black hair, vaguely lupine looks and air of tense repose�was rocked by hostile questioning. Wolfowitz not long ago dismissed Army chief Eric Shinseki�s call for a large peacekeeping force as �wildly off the mark.� Now he indicated that Iraq looked more complicated than Bosnia. �We�ve been in Bosnia for eight years,� Sen. Joseph Biden snapped back. �That would seem to compute that we�re likely to be in Iraq for a long time�a long time.�