{"id":81,"date":"2006-11-04T16:50:01","date_gmt":"2006-11-04T16:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=81"},"modified":"2006-11-04T16:50:01","modified_gmt":"2006-11-04T16:50:01","slug":"neocon-mea-culpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/neocon-mea-culpa\/","title":{"rendered":"Neocon Mea Culpa"},"content":{"rendered":"
Read the following quotes from David Rose's article in Vanity Fair and weep. What can you say? …. Sorry Iraqis. At least the neocons have a shred of honesty in admitting failure, something the President cannot claim. All the same, they are still convinced of the correctness of their original ideas and intentions. It is incumbent on the rest of us to demonstrate how the ideas are flawed; otherwise, they will be back, repackaged and dangerous.<\/div>\n
\n
Now They Tell Us Neo Culpa<\/a>
Vanity Fair by David Rose, <\/span>November 3, 2006 <\/span> <\/div>\n
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
Richard Perle<\/strong><\/div>\n
Perle says, "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.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
"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.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
David Frum<\/strong><\/div>\n
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may 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." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush. <\/div>\n
"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar:<\/strong> "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."<\/div>\n

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy:<\/strong> "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."<\/p>\n

Kenneth Adelman:<\/strong> "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. <\/p>\n

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. 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<\/span>. And that's very different from let's go<\/span>."<\/p>\n

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board:<\/strong> "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The other article worth reading in the same vein is:<\/p>\n

\n
Where Plan A left Ahmad Chalabi <\/strong><\/div>\n
By Dexter Filkins in the NYTimes Magazine (Here is one paragraph)<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
"The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz," Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. "They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out." Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America's big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein's downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately – the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. <\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
"We would have taken hold of the country," Chalabi says. "We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up."
.
"We would have taken hold of the country," Chalabi says. "We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up." <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the following quotes from David Rose's article in Vanity Fair and weep. What can you say? …. Sorry Iraqis. At least the neocons have a shred of honesty in admitting failure, something the President cannot claim. All the same, they are still convinced of the correctness of their original ideas and intentions. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neocons","category-us"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nNeocon Mea Culpa - Syria Comment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/neocon-mea-culpa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Neocon Mea Culpa - Syria Comment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Read the following quotes from David Rose's article in Vanity Fair and weep. 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