The Seven Horsemen of the Neoconservative Apocalypse Are All Shrill!

Six years ago, every Republican I talked to who would let his or her hair down agreed that George W. Bush was incompetent to be president.

It did not matter, they said, that we were electing somebody unqualified for the job.

George W. Bush was smart enough, they said, to know that he was a good face man--a good head-of-state--and a bad head of government. He would take advice. Paul O'Neill would contruct a reality-based economic policy, and Bush would approve it. Condi Rice and Colin Powell would contruct a reality-based foreign policy, and Bush would approve it. Rumsfeld would corral the Pentagon and get good money for our defense dollars. Cheney and Card would make sure the trains ran on time, that the policy process was orderly and fair, and that George W. Bush was persuaded by the various consensuses reached by his NSC, NEC, and other policy-forming bodies. That's what they said would happen.

Needless to say, it did not work out that way.

Today, David Rose watches the seven horsemen of the neoconservative apocalypse conduct the unspeakable dawn rites of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill as they denounce the mendacity, incompetence, disconnection from reality, and malevolence of George W. Bush and his administration:

Neo Culpa: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com: Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk... chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee... this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. 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." Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq.... I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel?... What I find... is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration....

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... This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"--starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "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 post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."...

I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played....

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "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."

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[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."

Kenneth Adelman: "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%u2014three 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. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

David Frum: "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."

Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "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."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.%... Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.%... I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. 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."

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "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."

Comments

[Roger Albin]

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives,...

This is so blatantly false that the only possible conclusion is that Perle actually believes that he and his fellow neocons had nothing to do with this trainwreck. As a inadvertant confession of complete intellectual and moral failure, this is hard to top.

[anne]

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/11/incompetence_everywhere/

November 3, 2006

Incompetence Everywhere
By Matthew Yglesias

Neocon war advocates including Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman concede the Iraq War is a disaster, but blame Bush's incompetence. This is what it comes to. We're all supposed to believe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Steven Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, etc., etc., etc., are just random freaks of nature. Nothing they or their other subordinates have done in office or the fact that everything they've done has worked out terribly is in any way supposed to reflect on the wider conservative movement.

Suffice it to say I find this all very unconvincing. These guys aren't repentant hawks, they're in denial.

[Precisely.]

[christofay]

Wow, five houses.

Denial, sure. Yet the blather continues. They're so bad Nuke Gangrene got back on the stage some how. It's getting late in the decade too, so Gangrene is due for a new wife.

[anne]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/200601019_after_pats_birthday/

October 19, 2006

After Pat's Birthday
By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air....

[BroD]

Feh! Even before Bush bungled it,the invasion of Iraq was a monumentally stupid idea.

[thereisnorule6]

it's the classic dodge - conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. The neo-cons claim they had all of these great ideas and Bush failed to implement them.

[Mike]

To me, it all smacks of that whining interview Abramoff did with Vanity Fair back in March. And, if there's any justice in the world, the 'story' for some (or all) of those guys will end the same way too...

[Emma Anne]

--- Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "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." ---

You know, I have read enough stupid stuff in the last six years to last me a lifetime, but this one reaches new levels of stupidity. Women have all the power in this administration? It's Laura's fault? Are you kidding me!? What, she gave the apple from the tree of knowledge to George? Argh!!

[anne]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612?printable=true&currentPage=all

November 3, 2006

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "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."

[Thank you, Emma Anne.]

[derek]

"Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives"

Why, yes, Richard Perle, yes, I have no doubt at all that you want to be as clear as you possibly can on that.

[derek]

As for Ken Adelman, he's just trying to rid himself of the albatross that history has tied around his neck: just typing "cakewalk ken" into Google, with no surname, double apostrophes, hyphens, or any kind of disambiguating capitals or punctuation, gets you an instant handful of top hits on Adelman and his legacy.

[andres]

Well, at least the defensiveness is encouraging. The neocons are starting to act as if they're already on trial. If there's any justice in the world, they soon will be.

[Eli Rabett]

Let them all go lie in a bathtub and do the decent thing.

[Schweik]

As these Straussians have always made a fetish of the martial virtues,let them emulate Samsonov after Tannenberg.

[andres]

Eli, Schweik, no need for wrist-slitting or Russian roulette. A decent prison term (life with parole only in old age, if that) is more than sufficiently just and humane for people like Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz.