WASHINGTON, 12 December 2003 — Two influential conservatives urged the White House yesterday to overrule a Pentagon decision to bar companies from countries that opposed the US-led Iraq war from competing for lucrative contracts to rebuild the country.

“President Bush, we suspect, is going to overrule the Pentagon’s attempt to exclude ... certain countries that have opposed US policy in Iraq,” wrote William Kristol and Robert Kagan, leading pundits with the neo-conservative political movement that enjoys considerable influence in the White House and US Republican circles.

“He might as well do it sooner rather than later, so as to minimize the diplomatic damage done by the Pentagon’s heavy-handed and counterproductive action,” Kristol and Kagan wrote in their right-of-center magazine The Weekly Standard.

While they embraced the general idea of holding nations accountable for their support — or lack thereof — for US policies, “this particular effort by the Pentagon to reward friends and punish enemies is stupid, and should be abandoned,” they wrote.

“A deviously smart American administration would have quietly distributed contracts for rebuilding Iraq as it saw fit,” wrote Kristol and Kagan, while “a truly wise American administration would have opened the bidding to all comers ... as a way of buying those countries into the Iraq effort, building a little goodwill for the future, and demonstrating to the world a little magnanimity.”

Meanwhile, US conservative groups gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a big slap on the back yesterday with a full-page ad in USA Today, countering a similar advertisement by liberals who criticized him in September and called for his resignation.

“Secretary Rumsfeld is under attack by the same coalition of Socialist-led anti-war demonstrators and radical left-wing Hollywood actors that tried to undermine our fight against terrorism with their blame America tactics during the war,” said the ad placed by the group rightmarch.com, backed by about 15 other groups.

In the New York Times ad, MoveOn.org claimed Rumsfeld had “betrayed our nation,” yesterday’s advertisement said.

But “the real traitors are the ones giving ‘aid and comfort’ to America’s enemies by taking out full-page ads in nationally distributed newspapers, attacking our leaders and heroes,” the rightmarch ad argued.

In another development, a new report said that California, Florida, Maryland and Tennessee are the states best prepared for a biochemical terrorist attack or other medical emergency and Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Wisconsin are the least prepared.

The study conducted by the Trust for America’s Health found that only nine of the 50 states met more than half of 10 preparedness targets drawn up by an advisory panel of past and present public health officials. None met more than seven targets and most states met five or fewer. Washington, D.C., with government offices and national monuments, achieved only 3 out of the 10 targets.