"Neo Culpa"Please don't call them "architects of the war": Richard (Prince of Darkness) Perle, David (Axis of Evil) Frum, Kenneth (Cakewalk) Adelman, and other elite neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq are beside themselves at the result.
Interesting interview from Vanity Fair (now published in its entirety on their web site), of Richard Perle, a PNAC / Bushie who helped frame the Iraq war, now sees the light in total hindsight. And that is OK, the trouble is with those stubborn fools who cannot see the light through the backsides of their trousers.
See the link below for the entire interview.These are the highlights....
Perle had spent much of the 1990s urging the ouster of Saddam Hussein. He was aligned with the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank that agitated for Saddam's removal, and he had helped to engineer the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which established regime change as formal U.S. policy. After the accession of George W. Bush, in 2001, Perle was appointed chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and at its first meeting after 9/11—attended by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; and Rumsfeld's No. 3, Douglas Feith—Perle arranged a presentation from the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi. Perle wanted to shut down terrorist havens—not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq.
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the Bush administration. The policy process has been nothing short of "disastrous," he 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.…
Perle goes as far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not advocate an invasion of Iraq: "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."
The article goes on to access the other neo-con proponents of the war think now...Would there be a similar "neo culpa"?
David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, accusing Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," says 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.
Kenneth Adelman, a longtime neocon activist and Pentagon insider who has served on the Defense Policy Board, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing, "I believe that demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I am extremely disappointed by the outcome in Iraq, because I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. 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." Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/01/neocons200701
2 comments:
I will try to engage you again. What do you think PNAC is Kimba?
http://religiopoliticaltalk.blogspot.com/2007/04/pnac-and-other-myths-pdf-above-link-is.html
PNAC is a "think tank", and would be an excellent subject for a huge post.
Basically, once upon a time, a group of conservatives (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Cohen, Bolton, Armitage, Kristol, Bennett, J Bush, Forbes, Gaffney, Libby, Kagan, Khalilzad, Rumsfeld, et al), got together and conspired to regain power in our government, and force their unique imperialistic world views on the country while we were still the only super power in the world.
They had a clear agenda. Overthrow Saddam, and gain a foot hold in the Middle East, among others.
But, none of them was electable. They would need to prop up a stuffed shirt / mannequin that would be electable (by fraud if necessary) but have no opinion towards anything foreign or domestic. Someone so intellectually naive, he doesn't even read. Someone who could be controlled. Yeah, and by his CIA / Former President father no less.
So they cleaned up George, sobered him up and propped him up. And the next thing you know old George is the President. The kin folk said, George, move away from there. The White House is the place you ought to be, so they rigged up some voting booths, and they moved to the west wing. (Sorry, had to do it)
PNAC has pulled the strings and orchestrated every move the Bush administration has made since day one. And before that. The members of PNAC have been active behind the scenes, and in fact, in front of the scenes in a very public way by holding down very influencial positions within the administration, including the VP.
They have orchestrated our middle east policy, and the overthrow of Hussein, and the invasion / occupation of Iraq. Their influence continues to this day, as the architects of the troop surge in Iraq.
Their initial assessments as to the level of Husseins strength, and arsenal of weapons was unfortunate. They thought they could march into Iraq and be cheered as liberators. They grossly miscalulated and quite possibly thrown us into a Vietnam like lengthy war in which we will leave with our tails between our legs. They, with the administration have destroyed our credibility worldwide as aggressors, and lost a significant number of our allies, as they press on with their agenda. History will show that this group of people (Kristol / Cheney / Bush, etc.), was the single most inept group of leaders ever assembled, or as Kenneth Adelman was quoted as describing the administration as "deadly and dysfunctional." I believe that history will show that PNAC had more influence over the Bush administration than any other entity enjoyed in the history of the nation.
In 25 words or less, that is what I believe about PNAC. And it is true, I read it in Daily Kos. Of course, there are a large percentage of Jews in PNAC, aren't there?
Post a Comment