Neocons turn on Bush for incompetence over Iraq war

I've said before that the rats have started to desert Mr Bush's sinking ship.

Now a group of neo-cons have got together for an article in this months Vanity Fair in which they attack Bush for his "incompetence" in carrying out the Iraq war and, in some cases, having the temerity to question the wisdom of the 2003 invasion that they once strenuously promoted. Rats have no morals and even less memory it would appear.

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.

First to launch himself into the water was Richard Perle, who one can only describe as a true believer. Perle once famously said of the Iraq invasion, "If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Just before his fat ass hit the water he had considerably changed his tune:

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'."

Kenneth Adelman who sat on the Defence Policy Board and who had said Iraq would be a, "cakewalk" has performed a similar U-Turn as he escapes:

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."

Aldeman went even further than most and announced the death of neo-conservatism:

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".

Rubin and Frum were equally damning:

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.

Of course the theme that runs through all their complaints is not that the war was a bad idea per se, but that Bush's handling of it was incompetent. In this way they attempt to distance themselves from the mess of Iraq whilst refusing to accept their responsibility in the creation of that disaster.

For people like Perle to pretend that if he knew then what he knows now that he would not have supported the invasion simply beggars belief.

Perle and his ilk were this wars architects and it's loudest supporters. Let us never forget the mindset that exemplified the neo-cons and the supporters of Project for a New American Century:

Once we assert the unilateral right to act as the world’s policeman, our allies will quickly recede into the background. We will be forces to spend American wealth and American blood protecting the peace while other nations redirect their wealth to such things as health care for the citizenry.

The lure of empire is ancient and powerful, and over the millennia it has driven men to commit terrible crimes on its behalf. But with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, a global empire was essentially laid at the feet of the United States. To the chagrin of some, we did not seize it at the time, in large part because the American people have never been comfortable with themselves as a "New Rome".

And there were plenty of people decrying Perle and his ilk at the time, people who could see very well what PNAC were all about:

"This is a blueprint for United States world domination - a new world order of their making, "Tam Dalyell, British parliamentarian and critic of the war policy from the Labor Party said. "These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. This is garbage from think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks," Dalyell said, "men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war.

William Rivers Pitt wrote on February 25, 2003, "Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana."

These rats can hit the water at the speed of light, but they wrote down far too much on paper before they jumped in for any of us to ever seriously believe that there was a time when they might have said no to the invasion.

What lies burning in the streets of Baghdad are the chickenhawk's hopes of empire.

That they can have the gall to pretend that this policy is not 100% their own merely adds a lack of grace to the lack of courage that we always knew was their hallmark. These men were perfectly willing to have other people's children die for their causes.

Now they are not even willing to own the cause that they risked other people's lives for.

Some things are simply beneath contempt. And this U-Turn is certainly one of them.

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tag: Perle, Frum, neo-cons, Bush, Iraq war, war on terror, "Stay the course"