Missle test fails, Bayh slams Rumsfeld, and other news

The Washington Post reports that the latest setback in the Pacific is fueling some doubts about the future.

The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.

Pentagon officials could not immediately explain the reason for the failure. They said some kind of anomaly prompted the automatic shutdown of the launch sequence just 23 seconds before the interceptor was due to take off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Plans had called for the interceptor to soar into space and knock down a mock warhead fired from Kodiak Island in Alaska about 16 minutes earlier.

The Indianapolis Star reports that success is not certain in Iraq according to Senator Evan Bayh.

"The only thing I can say with certainty is that this is going to be difficult," Bayh, a Democrat, said Wednesday. "It's going to take more lives and blood and money than any of us would like. But we need to try and stick it through because the consequences of failure are going to be profound."

Bayh said the United States made "tragic" mistakes -- insufficient troop levels, dismissing Iraqis with ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi army -- that fueled the insurgency and continue to make security unstable weeks before the Jan. 30 elections.

"One assessment we received is things would be 100 percent better today if we had not sent home all the leaders of the Iraqi armed forces," said Bayh, who earlier this year was forced to cancel a trip to Iraq because of security concerns.

Is this a vote of no confidence in Secretary Donald Rumsfeld?
Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is being speculated to run in 2008 for President. How can any moderate Republican expect to win?