When it rains, it pours: The Guardian Julian Borger in Washington Saturday November 4, 2006 Guardian Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting. Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war, Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article that could influence Tuesday's battle for the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election. "I think the influence will be on morale [among Republicans]," said Steven Clemons, the head of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation. "I think they are confusing the right. What this is yielding is ambivalence, and people will stay at home." Mr Perle, a member of the influential Defence Policy Board that advised the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in the run-up to the war, is as outspoken in denouncing the conduct of the war as he was once bullish on the invasion. He blamed "dysfunction" in the Bush administration for the present quagmire. "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly," Mr Perle told Vanity Fair, according to early excerpts of the article. "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible." Asked if he would still have pushed for war knowing what he knows now, Mr Perle, a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, said: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'." The Bush administration admits it was mistaken in believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but the president and other top officials maintain that Iraq is better off as a result of his removal. An overwhelming majority of Americans, however, now believe the war was not worth the cost in blood and resources. The public rethink by top neocons comes at a time of rising violence, with the US death toll climbing steadily towards 3,000 and the United Nations estimating that many Iraqis may be being killed by the conflict each month. Kenneth Adelman, another Reagan era hawk who sat on the Defence Policy Board until last year, drew attention with a 2002 commentary in the Washington Post predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk". He now says he hugely overestimated the abilities of the Bush team. "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent," Mr Adelman said. "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." He too takes back his public urging for military action, in light of the administration's performance. "I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked 'can't do'. And that's very different from 'let's go'." Mr Adelman, a senior Reagan adviser at cold war summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, expressed particular disappointment in Mr Rumsfeld, who he described as a particular friend. "I'm crushed by his performance," he said. "Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me." Mr Adelman said the guiding principle behind neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world", had been killed off for a generation at least. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell". Michael Rubin, who worked on the staff of the Pentagon's office of special plans and the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad, accused Mr Bush of betraying Iraqi reformers. The president's actions, Mr Rubin said, had been "not much different from what his father did on February 15 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did". Mr Frum, who as a White House speechwriter helped coin the phrase "axis of evil" in 2002, said failure in Iraq might be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them". The blame, Mr Frum said, lies with "failure at the centre", beginning with the president.
No surprise at all. I predicted the GOP would completely turn on Bush over Iraq because the voting public would demand it. Let's face it, Bush is almost completely radioactive and will be one of the most irrelevant lame ducks ever. I said a few months ago there are basically 3 political entities: GOP, Dems and the Bush admin. The Iraq disaster, his self-destructive loyalty to Rummy and Cheney and other things have pushed Bush into a very small corner of his own making. Let me also mention the GOP's 2008 nominee (even if it's McCain) will renounce Bush's Iraq policy and completely run from it. That is the only way he will have a chance to win. After the dust settles Wednesday morning, the REAL election starts. For several reasons, it's quite possible Iraq is an even bigger issue in 2008 than it is now.
I disagree about "the real election" starting Wednesday. Nothing is more important than Democrats taking the House and, hopefully, the Senate, this Tuesday. I certainly agree with the rest of it. Bush is out of control, and divorced from reality. His own closest supporters have turned against him, except for the incompetents closest to him, like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bush needs to be checked now. Democrats need to exhibit relevance starting Tuesday, not two years from now. Thanks, vwiggin, for posting the article. Keep D&D Civil.
Wise words... THE NEOCON REHABILITATION PROJECT. ...David Rose's Vanity Fair interview with the neocon elite is getting plenty of well-deserved attention this weekend. For one thing, it's fun to play the "which quote is the most damning?" game. Is it Michael Ledeen (the most powerful people in the White House are "women who are in love with the president")? Kenneth Adelman ("They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era")? David Frum (George Bush "just did not absorb the ideas")? But that can wait. A few months ago I noted in passing that it was only a matter of time before the neocon hawks began claiming, like old-time Trotskyists, that there was nothing wrong with their ideas, only with the fools who had bungled their execution. Richard Perle states this the most directly: It's worth saying very plainly what's going on here: the neocons are using these interviews to make the case that neoconservatism is in no way to blame for the disaster in Iraq. If they had been in charge things would have been different. This baby needs to be strangled in its crib. The 1997 "Statement of Principles" of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon Bible, was signed by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, and Elliot Abrams. All of these men were deeply involved in the formulation, planning, and execution of the Iraq war. The neocon creed was part and parcel of every move they made. What's more, despite their conveniently-timed hand wringing about incompetent execution, there's little evidence that the apologists would have done anything very different — in fact, little evidence that they cared very much about anything beyond "bringing down Saddam." Rather, neocons have always been focused on conventional military power, and plenty of it, primarily aimed at potential enemies like China. (Despite the revisionist history spit out now and again by their supporters, terrorism simply wasn't a major neocon focus prior to 9/11.) But conventional military power wasn't the problem in Iraq. The problem was in the occupation, an area that neocons have never cared a fig about. Peacekeeping forces? Nation building? Multilateral legitimacy? Language and cultural training? Counterinsurgency? Economic engagement? It's easy to cherry-pick the neocon archives to find bits and pieces where they talked up some of this stuff. But their overall focus has always been on the use of overwhelming force and intimidation, with a sideline in democracy promotion rooted more in fantasy than in a hard look at what it takes to actually make democracy take root in a region with none of the economic or institutional infrastructure to support it. Anybody with ground-level experience in nation building could have explained the problems, but they didn't want to listen. A sufficient show of force was supposed to be enough to make democracy flower. The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That's what the neocons wanted, and that's what they got. The rest is details. The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_11/010006.php
But you'll notice jorgie doesn't dare come into threads like this these days. Just starts threads feigning outrage about fiction novels written 40 years ago.
As soon as it became clear the Dems would definitely get the House on Tuesday, the real battle became 2008. They don't need the Senate to impose their will on the process starting Wednesday. With one house in Congress under their control, the Dems immediately become relevant and what they do the next two years will determine if voters feel they are worthy to take power in 2008. Again, to clarify, the real battle became 2008 only when it was obvious the Dems were going to get the House in 2006. It's almost a given McCain is the GOP nominee in 2008. The Dems must choose a standard-bearer that can unite the party and give them an identity. If they don't, too bad for them because they have a golden opportunity. I'm not hopeful.
I don't agree that McCain is going to get the nomination in '08. In fact, I strongly doubt that he has a serious chance. He obviously believes he does, but I don't see him surviving a vicious assault from the far right during the primaries, which will happen despite the sucking up to them by McCain that I've found so distasteful. I noted, with interest, that Giuliani is on radio spots for Perry's campaign now. I don't know who's paying for them... didn't catch that, but he's another person conventional wisdom would expect to be a strong GOP candidate for the '08 nomination. I think he'll be chewed up and spit out by the process, as well. I actually like Giuliani, or did before I heard this radio spot. Yes, I know why the two men are doing what they are doing, but it doesn't mean I have to have any respect for the fact that they are. And if we don't capture the Senate, or get in a position to stop judicial nominations, we'll see further damage done by Bush that will echo down the years... damage that people like basso think well worth this "brilliant war-time leadership." Keep D&D Civil.
This article says more about the fact that the rats are jumping ship and want to save the last fibers of their reputation.These NeoCon nitwits are going to hang it all on Bush, but they share a lot of blame. The ideology of pre-emptive war and democracy at the end of the barrell they have championed for decades is flawed no matter who is executing the policy. You watch, these lizards and their off-spring will emerge in the 2020's promoting some other foreign policy adventure to line their swiss bank accounts just as America starts to recover from this disaster.
The problems with the invasion and occupation of Iraq were obvious in 2002 and for these people now to argue that they were taken by surprise by the incompetance of this Admin. not only shows their own desire to scapegoat but also their own lack of wisdom. The signs were obvious that things were going to be far far more problematic than the optimistic picture that the Admn was painting in the run up to the war. The mere fact that the Army Chief of Staff publically stated that the numbers presented to occupy the country seemed low should've been a huge warning sign. Anyone who knew anything about Iraq's history or occupations should've realized that the Admin.'s plan was highly problematic. While removing Saddam seemed like a good idea any rational assesment of the costs vs. the benefits of doing so in early 2003 should've realized this was a bad idea. Its too late now that even those who pushed for this are realizing it now.
I think even anyone who totally supported the invasion of Iraq can see gross errors in management of that war by the coalition. (And whether Bush was himself in error or not, by leading the charge, he should shoulder the blame.) The most obvious of these was Fallujah, but others exist as well. The surprise isn't that the war supporters turned on Bush. The surprise is that it took so long.
My concern is that every few years the nation exchanges one set of stone cold sociopaths for another. In the balance little is accomplished. The system itself is dysfunctional so far as the best interests of the average person. The nations needs a systemic reformation of sorts. Who will lead it, that is the question?
