Neocons turn on Bush for incompetence over Iraq war

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday November 4, 2006
The 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.

www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1939472,00.html

Neo Culpa

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.

by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006 Richard Perle. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, 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."

George W. Bush. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated 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."

Having spoken with Perle, 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? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.

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.

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."

Dick Cheney. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. 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. And that's very different from let's go."

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. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.

I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.

Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."

Donald Rumsfeld. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
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—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. 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."

Condoleezza Rice. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
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."

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612?printable=tru¤tPage=all

Dual Loyalties
The Bush Neocons and Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA political analysts
www.counterpunch.org/christison09062004.html

Neocons Make Excuses for Mass Murder
Saturday November 04th 2006, 5:25 am

In America, instead of facing justice, criminals from up high usually write memoirs, or become “elder statesmen,” and are interviewed, settling comfortably into the historical record, either oblivious to or proud of the swathe of blood and gore that enshrouds them.

For instance, take the neocons, who should be filling up the docket at the Hague for plotting and executing the invasion and occupation of Iraq—current death total, 650,000, with millions floundering in abject misery—but are instead allowed to walk free and talk freely with David Rose, Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, Michael Rubin, Eliot Cohen—these comprise the very marrow of the neocon criminal camarilla. Rose interviews them as one would interview any petty bureaucrat (Adolf Eichmann comes to mind). Rose’s article, or the short preview here, casts the neocons as pentiti, the Italian word for those who have repented.

Well, sort of, as the sociopath rarely repents, but instead blames others, as the neocons blame Bush and his obsequious followers and lackluster appointees, all outside the neocon circle.

For instance, Richard Perle, long considered the Prince of Darkness (apologies to film director Tatsuo Sato), now tells us the “levels of brutality [in Iraq] that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity.” In other words, according to Perle, once the civil underpinnings were pulled out from beneath Iraq—by way of depleted uranium-enhanced bunker buster and cruise missile—the result surprised even him, a seasoned psychopath, experienced dissembler, and traitor (as “an Israeli agent of influence” caught “discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy” in 1970, according to Paul Findley).

“According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush,” writes Rose, avoiding mention of Perle’s obvious conflict of interest with the Defense Policy Board, thus resulting in his resignation—according to ace investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Perle had business dealings with Saudi investors and was linked to the intelligence-related computer firm Trireme Partners LLP, which Hersh claimed stood to profit from the war in Iraq. In other words, the more depravity and the longer the United States “stays the course,” the more cabbage for the Prince of Darkness.

Had Perle possessed “delphic” vision, he tells Rose, “he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq.” Back in the day, when Perle was the “Study Group Leader” of the gang that crafted the “Clean Break” document, originally presented to the Likudite leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, a direct invasion of Iraq was not called for either, but it was certainly alluded to, and a couple years later, in an open letter to Clinton, Perle and clan declared the removal of Saddam Hussein “now needs to become the aim of American diplomacy.” Call it gunboat diplomacy, or maybe cruise missile diplomacy. Perle and the neocons were not asking for a polite tête-à-tête between Clinton and Hussein, resulting in a step-down for the dictator.

Naturally, when things went bad, as they invariably do when Goliath takes on David, the neocons turned on their impaired puppet, George Bush, who is essentially a drug and alcohol dilapidated mental wreck, a haphazardly chosen front man. It is perfectly within the malicious personality of the neocon to turn on a nominal and expendable leader when things get tough and do not go exactly as planned.

“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,” whines Perle, unable to accept his role in massive war crimes, a bloody attainment close to rivaling the crimes of the Nazis (all told, with Bush Senior and Bubba Clinton on the mass murder roster, more than 3 million Iraqis have died, and an incalculable number of others, mostly helpless children, will die horrible deaths for the indeterminable future as depleted uranium takes its ghastly toll).

For his participation, Perle should face a tribunal and then a firing squad—but then so should the traitor Bush, his old man, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Clinton, and the neocons numbered above.

Instead, they will be interviewed, courted, cajoled, paid handsomely by various franchises, and will likely never face justice.

In Pax Americana, that’s how the ball bounces, and long as it continues to bounce without aberration, the criminals will be treated as celebrities and “elder statesmen,” at large to write their extenuating memoirs, taking six figure advances while the children of Iraq suffer endless birth deformities (the half life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years).

kurtnimmo.com/?p=639

End of the Neo-Cons
Nov. 5, 2006. 08:16 AM
DAVID OLIVE


"Every dogma has its day."
— Abraham Rotstein

"America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law! (italics added)
— Katharine Lee Bates, "America The Beautiful" (1893)

Whether or not the Republicans lose control of one or both houses of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, the neo-conservative vision that has guided American foreign policy since 2001 has run its course. The neo-cons' grand design lies in ruins, having accomplished nothing other than to shrink America's stature in the world.

The great unwinding of the American "benign global hegemony" first heralded by neo-cons William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1996 will commence after the election, when America's political leadership will abandon Iraq and the neo-cons.

The neo-cons' starting point, of course, was the Americanization of Iraq — the "easy win" that would trigger rogue states from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula to fall in line with American values of capitalism, democracy and pro-Israel policies.

But the Iraq conflict has proved unwinnable. And as handmaidens to a $300-billion (U.S.) catastrophe in Iraq that has cost the lives of at least 400,000 Iraqis and almost 3,000 American soldiers, and which ranks as the worst American foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam, the neo-cons have irretrievably lost their credibility.

By Christmas or soon thereafter, a White House that has run out of options on Iraq will begin to cut and run, pronouncing favourably on an exit plan that is now in the final stages of completion by a team led by James Baker, former U.S. secretary of state and a close friend of the Bush family, and Lee Hamilton, a respected former congressman and Democrat who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission.

Having already scrapped his Iraq mantra of "stay the course" late last month, U.S. President George W. Bush will adopt the most substantive points of the Baker-Hamilton blueprint for extricating America from the Iraq quagmire with as much dignity as possible. Baker, despised by the neo-cons for his nuanced, diplomatic approach to geopolitics, has already indicated that the options under consideration by his team are all variations of withdrawal. The only questions are how rapidly the Americans will leave, and which honeyed words the Bush administration will use in trying to dress up failure as success.

Withdrawal from Iraq can't come a moment too soon for a Republican Party paying a heavy price for allowing itself to be hijacked by one of the most naïve world views to come down the pike since Henry Ford chartered a shipload of peace activists and set sail for Europe in 1915. There isn't a Republican drawing breath, war hawk John McCain included, who wants to campaign in 2008 on a diplomatic and military horror show produced and directed by a Republican White House and a GOP-controlled Congress.

How long it takes for the neo-cons' influence to shrivel up completely is a matter of speculation, of course. Their clubhouse, the American Enterprise Institute, isn't in trouble with its landlord yet. William Kristol, son of neo-con godhead Irving Kristol and "Dan Quayle's brain" as chief-of-staff to the former vice-president, remains editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, the club's newsletter, and a ubiquitous talking head despite his role as the galvanizing force of a bankrupt theology.

And barring regime change at The Wall Street Journal, space will continue to be found on its extremist editorial pages for the hectoring of neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, David Frum, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Elliott Abrams, Ken Adelman, James Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Christopher Hitchens and neo-con-sympathizers Michael Ignatieff, Naill Ferguson and Margaret MacMillan.

But the neo-cons got a taste of things to come when Kristol appeared on a National Public Radio panel in late July with Gen. William Odom (ret.). Kristol, the first and probably last magazine editor to help spearhead American foreign policy, was arguing for a hard line against Hezbollah in the midst of another U.S. foreign-policy debacle, the civilian deaths and $3.6-billion (U.S.) worth of property damage the Israeli Defence Forces managed to inflict on Lebanon with White House encouragement. When it was his turn to speak, Odom was beside himself:

"Mr. Kristol certainly wants to make (Lebanon) our war," Odom said. "He's the man with remarkable moral clarity. He tends to forget the clarity he had on getting us into the mess in Mesopotamia. I think if you look at his record, you'd wonder why anybody would allow him to speak publicly anymore."

Among Republicans, the knives are out for their former neo-conservative comrades in arms, including Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. secretary who was one of the original signatories, in 1997, of the neo-cons' founding playbook, Kristol's Project for the New American Century, along with fellow travellers Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, and a dozen or so other future members of the Bush II administration. There's no novelty in the recent calls for the removal of Rumsfeld, described recently by The Economist as "responsible for having needlessly alienated more former friends of the United States than any other instrument since the invention of the B-52 bomber." Nothing new except that Republicans candidates have joined the dump-Rumsfeld chorus, and party regulars seldom embarrass their leader in the midst of an election campaign by openly questioning the composition of his cabinet. That's how desperate Republicans are for at least the impression of change.

Rumsfeld, erstwhile chief salesman for the artificial sweetener Aspartame, holds one geopolitical idea, and one that is wrong — that wars can be won with technological wizardry alone. Hence Rumsfeld's under-deployment of troops that doomed the neo-cons' Iraq reinvention mission from the start. About which Rumsfeld is witheringly unapologetic. That's a trait shared with most of Rummy's fellow neo-cons, and which once came off as admirably principled conviction. It now strikes the 60 per cent of American poll respondents who disagree with the conduct of the war in Iraq as rank stupidity.

"The principal sin of the neo-conservatives is overbearing arrogance," says David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. Like his counterparts at the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and other conservative think tanks preoccupied with tax cuts and fiscal probity, Keene is unhappy that his agenda has been turned on its head since 2001 by a fiscally ruinous neo-con revival of an old idea — that of American foreign-policy "exceptionalism."

Under the influence of neo-cons like Cheney, who has privately said that deficits don't matter, America has endured six years of runaway spending by a GOP-controlled Congress and a near-doubling in the congressionally approved debt ceiling since Bill Clinton left office, to $9 trillion (U.S.).

Of the ongoing disaster in Iraq, neo-con agitator David Frum gamely argued recently that, "The war has to be seen through the prism of Hurricane Katrina," alluding to the incompetence that earned Bush the distinction of being the first president to lose a great American city through sheer passivity. "Conservatives will support a tough war if they are confident in the war's management."

Frum echoes Michael Ignatieff, who, like many liberal hawks on Iraq in 2002-03, has since taken refuge in the proposition that no one could have foreseen that "the Americans in Iraq would make every mistake possible." Could not, that is, have foreseen that an Iraq occupation might be botched by a nation with the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and the Iran-Contra scandal on its record; that by choice lacks the peacekeeping and other skills associated with successful occupations; and is led by a chief executive who arrived at the presidency with a declared aversion to nation-building. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers," candidate Bush said in a Houston speech on Sept. 16, 2000, "and the great country called America will be the pacemakers [sic]."


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Let it not be said the neo-cons are without a legacy, despite the brief zenith of their influence.

Long after the days of "The smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud," "Shock and awe," "Mission accomplished" and "Bring 'em on" are mercifully past, historians will chronicle an early 21st-century America so distracted from its real enemy that Osama bin Laden and even the perpetrators of the 2001 anthrax attacks against Congressional leaders are still at large.

An America, too, whose diplomatic influence has cratered, due not only to the unilateral belligerence with which America went to war in Iraq, but also the incompetence subsequently exposed in almost every particular of its Iraq occupation: intelligence breakdowns; acrimonious relations between the civilian and military U.S. occupation leadership; rampant theft by contractors; and the failure to provide Iraqis with security, power, fresh water and other essentials even now, 43 months after the invasion. The resulting diplomatic void has been filled by China and Russia, now resisting U.S. calls for their imposition of sanctions against North Korea and Iran, respectively.

There also is the blighting of America's self-image as a champion of human rights, with U.S.-sanctioned torture of terrorist suspects Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Canadian citizen Maher Arar, and countless other detainees at Guantanamo Bay, at the network of covert CIA detention centres across Europe and the Middle East, and at Saddam Hussein's notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, reopened by U.S. forces to warehouse thousands of Iraqi citizens rousted from their homes in random sweeps. Bush's repeated lie that "America does not do torture" merely compounds the current distrust of the United States.

And there is the discredited state of American conservatism, which has allowed neo-cons to trade away its electoral trump cards of perceived superiority over Democrats in foreign policy, national security and balancing the books. Infighting between the secular neo-cons and the GOP base of fiscal hawks and evangelical Christians will intensify after the expected Republican losses on Tuesday. And that will likely thwart Bush counsellor Karl Rove's ambition to make the GOP the permanent U.S. governing party.

Finally, there are the consequences of America's certain failure in Iraq.

Apart from the crisis of the boat-people evacuees, the fall of Saigon was not cataclysmic. Having achieved its goal of being left alone, Vietnam now peddles its wares at Wal-Mart and extends a warm greeting to American corporate investors.


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The smug moral superiority of which Canadians are accused has nothing on Americans' self-regard as upholders of supreme moral authority.
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The aftermath for Iraq, located in the world's most volatile region, will be a different story. Lacking the cultural homogeneity of Vietnam, Iraq may eat itself alive as at least a dozen ethnic enclaves nursing centuries-old grievances struggle for dominance or self-preservation. The chaos could infect neighbours, as Kurdish nationalists lay a more assertive claim to Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iran, and Shiites aligned with Tehran battle Shia factions loyal to Iraq.

Repeated U.S. State Department warnings about the obvious parallel between the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans after the death of strongman Josip Broz Tito and the break-up of Yugoslavia and the potential for anarchy after the removal of Saddam Hussein were brushed aside by Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, the central actors pushing for Saddam's rushed downfall.

Lifting the lid on that cauldron might eventually have been advisable. The aging Saddam wasn't going to rule forever. But doing so after rejecting elaborate plans from the State Department and other branches of the administration for a peaceful, multilateral occupation of Iraq amounts to something of a war crime. Rather than pacify the Middle East, as they intended, the neo-cons have managed to further destabilize it.

The chief hope now for Iraq is that, after 87 years of existence, Iraqi nationalism is a sufficiently potent force to prevail over sectarian rivalry, and that a respected central government emerges to secure the peace, rebuild a social and transportation infrastructure ravaged by three wars since 1980, and ensure an equitable distribution of oil wealth among 28.8 million Iraqis. And that a truly multilateral coalition emerges to help make those things happen.


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For the purposes of this essay, neo-conservatism refers not to domestic policy; nor is it a global concept. Strictly speaking, "neo-conservatism" is a distinctly U.S. phenomenon calling for the projection of U.S. values worldwide, premised in an American belief in its moral authority that reaches back to the Founding Fathers. In the words of pamphleteer Thomas Paine, arguably the first neo-con: "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind."

By the time Katharine Lee Bates, a teacher at Wellesley, the women's liberal arts college near Boston, was inspired by a train trip through the Great Plains to write her ode to America, her young nation already had deployed military forces to more than 30 countries, including neighbouring Canada and far-flung Egypt, the Philippines, Uruguay and Formosa.

The smug moral superiority of which Canadians are accused on occasions when they dissent from U.S. foreign policy has nothing on Americans' self-regard as upholders of supreme moral authority in the world. As President William McKinley explained, in justifying the occupation of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and other spoils of war captured from the Spanish at the dawn of the 20th century, "there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died."

In the latest iteration of American exceptionalism, manifested by today's neo-cons, "American hegemony is the only reliable defence against a breakdown of peace and international order." So wrote Kristol and Kagan in their seminal 1996 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Or, more crudely, "We need to be more assertive and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia," said neo-con Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, just prior to the Iraq invasion.

Or, more crudely still, "Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small, crappy, little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," said neo-con Michael Ledeen in an American Enterprise Institute forum.

While Kristol's Weekly Standard endorsed the worldly war hero John McCain for the presidency in 2000, the neo-cons were far luckier in the selection, by five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, of George W. Bush, an empty vessel who knew less about the conventions of foreign policy than his well-travelled father had forgotten.

"Bush had a poor memory for facts and figures," Frum recalled following his abrupt departure from Bush's speechwriting shop after his authorship of "axis of hatred" (later modified to "axis of evil" by chief speechwriter Michael Gerson) was revealed to a wide network of friends by a spouse untutored in the cardinal rule of speechwriting (anonymity). "Fire a question at (Bush) about the specifics of his administration's policies," Frum said, "and he often appeared uncertain. Nobody would ever enrol him in a quiz show."

A delighted Richard Perle, a 30-year veteran of the Pentagon and a foreign-policy adviser on Bush's 2000-01 transition team, was equally blunt: "The first time I met Bush," he said, "two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."

That ignorance has been the neo-cons' undoing. Their vision might have survived the failure of its first test — in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban is now spreading its influence in the south — but not the spectacular encore in Iraq, where an Iraqi middle class that initially welcomed Saddam's fall is now contemptuous of American occupiers who cannot provide them with more than two-and-a-half hours of electricity per day or end the sectarian firefights that keep many Iraqis from venturing to work or school.

Factual ignorance is a recurring neo-con theme, such as when aides to the new president were surprised to discover that the former Texas governor did not know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, two of America's three largest government programs. Later, as planning for the Iraq invasion was getting underway, it would have to be explained to the decider-in-chief that Iraq was culturally divided among groups known as Shia, Sunni and Kurds.

Dick Cheney, whose knowledge of arms-control policy is limited to his belief that it is a form of appeasement, was tapping long-dormant brain cells in August 2002 when he asserted that, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Wolfowitz, a defence-policy veteran with no background in global oil production, should similarly have been asked on what authority he claimed, days before the invasion in March 2003, that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for the neo-cons' Iraq rehabilitation project. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon," Wolfowitz said at that time.

Any expert in global oil politics could have informed the administration (and a credulous media) that after more than a decade of sanctions and Saddam's own neglect of Iraq's petroleum wealth (the dictator pumped enough oil to finance his army and 19 mansions, and not much more), Iraq's oil infrastructure was held together with reconditioned parts of 1950s vintage and was almost as degraded as Saddam's military prowess. Even assuming the absence of postwar insurgents who persistently targeted Iraq's oil wellheads and pipelines, billions of foreign dollars and at least a decade's time would have been required to modernize Iraqi oil and gas production to the point where it could meaningfully contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq — the world's largest oil-reserves holder where motorists must queue for imported gasoline.

As national security advisor in the new administration, future secretary of state Condoleezza Rice also suffered a knowledge deficit in matters most directly affecting her job. Richard Clarke, chief White House counter-terrorism advisor and a holdover from the Clinton administration, was taken aback in early 2001 to learn that Rice had never heard of Al Qaeda.

The former Stanford University provost is a student of Russian affairs, not a policy area of over-arching value when America's chief concern is violent expressions of Islamic fundamentalism. Given Rice's paucity of Middle East expertise, she was easily overpowered by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and other administration neo-cons who disdained both the CIA and the State Department as being, in their view, woefully behind the curve on Middle East political dynamics.

That's the context in which Rice, in her daily briefing of Bush aboard Air Force One en route to Crawford, Tex. on Aug. 6, 2001, counselled her boss not to read too much into that day's CIA report, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It's why the president's national-security gatekeeper filtered out dozens of reports from the CIA and elsewhere in the administration throughout the spring and summer of that fateful year warning of a sudden spike in Al Qaeda activity.

On his last day in office, in the traditional meeting between retiring and incoming presidents, Clinton identified Al Qaeda to Bush as America's most pressing foreign-policy challenge. Yet later that same month, January 2001, Rice themed the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush presidency on the topic of "how Iraq is destabilizing the [Middle East] region." It was, to be sure, a Lewis Carroll moment, given that Iran and Saudi Arabia were widely known to be the region's leading exporters of terror. (The former bankrolls Hezbollah; the latter is homeland to bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11, who derived their astonishingly modest $500,000 in Sept. 11 costs largely from Saudi backers.) Saddam, meanwhile, was a conspicuously weak pan-Arab laughingstock, having been bested in his eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s and by the U.S.-led coalition that drove him out of Kuwait in the Gulf War.

David Frum has said more than once that if Bush had not promptly launched a conventional war in the aftermath of 9/11, the president would have been ridden out of D.C. on a rail — a view shared by doves and hawks alike. ("Declare war on somebody! It doesn't matter what country," was Kagan's reaction to 9/11.) But it's not true. The job called for old-fashioned detective work. America's only unalloyed victory since 9/11 —the dispersal of Al Qaeda's network with the capture of many of its leaders — resulted from methodical intelligence gathering, and especially from the collaboration of American intel experts and a 155-year-old enterprise known as Western Union, whose interception of financial transactions by Al Qaeda and other terrorist operatives mapped the identity, location, and planned activities of entire networks of terrorist cells.

Come Wednesday, a Democratic-controlled House or Senate invested with subpoena power might begin, finally, to learn if the Bush administration was simply asleep at the switch prior to 9/11, or whether it deliberately chose to ignore a terrorist threat it didn't understand in favour of Iraq, a conventional target that suited its neo-conservative agenda.


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Some supporters got off the neo-conservative bus earlier than others. The entire staff of liberal hawks at The New Republic endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and agonized in print over their misplaced faith in both Bush and the neo-con agenda. And that grand old man of American conservatism, William F. Buckley, conceded in an interview the same year with his long-time nemesis The New York Times that, "With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extraterrestrial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

In his new book, After the Neocons, apostate Francis (The End of History) Fukuyama, another original signer of Kristol's Project for a New American Century manifesto, publicly turned in his neo-con membership card. He was prompted to do so, he reports, after listening to a 2004 speech by Charles Krauthammer, the McGill-educated syndicated columnist and probably the last trained psychiatrist who will ever be mistaken by media peers as being invested with foreign-policy gravitas. In that speech, the irrepressible Iraq War shill described the mounting chaos in Iraq as a nearly unqualified success. Neo-conservatism, Fukuyama concluded, "has evolved into something I can no longer support."

As in Somalia, Haiti, Angola, the Philippines and Vietnam, where about four million Vietnamese died during the French and American military interventions of 1954-1975, the United States in Iraq will leave behind a mess. That has too often been the American way (the U.S.'s post-WWII occupations of Germany, Italy and Japan notably excepted): Invade. Make a bad situation worse. Leave. All with the best of intentions.

Harry Truman's foreign policy was unquestionably robust. Yet the Missourian understood that even a superpower benefits from self-restraint. Addressing the UN's founding convention in San Francisco in 1945, Truman said: "We all have to recognize — no matter how great our strength — that we must deny ourselves the licence to do always as we please."

No reasonable person would urge a return to the U.S. isolationism that characterized the GOP as recently as the 1990s. When not under the sway of a Robert McNamara or Dick Cheney, America is indeed the "indispensable nation" of Bill Clinton's description. And Clinton proved it more than once by ending a Balkans genocide after years of dawdling by European powers, bailing out Mexico after a short-lived peso crisis, and brokering peace in Northern Ireland and East Timor.

It's possible that, after its humbling in Iraq, America will retreat into itself instead of rejoining the community of nations and the pursuit of truly consensual solutions to the crises of global injustice, impoverishment and environmental degradation.

In that case, the neo-cons will have earned their place in one of the inner circles of hell.

www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_

Perle says he should not have backed Iraq war
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
November 4, 2006


WASHINGTON — Richard N. Perle, the former Pentagon advisor regarded as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq war, now believes he should not have backed the U.S.-led invasion, and he holds President Bush responsible for failing to make timely decisions to stem the rising violence, according to excerpts from a magazine interview.

Perle — a leading neoconservative who chaired the Pentagon's defense advisory board for the first three years of the Bush administration — is quoted in January's Vanity Fair as saying the U.S. might have been able to strip Saddam Hussein of his ability to build unconventional weapons "by means other than a direct military intervention."

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"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,' " Perle said, according to interview excerpts released Friday by the magazine.

Perle's about-face is the latest in a series of war recriminations by neoconservatives, many of whom blame Iraq's spiraling violence on the administration's management of the postwar stabilization effort.

Others interviewed for the article included former Bush speechwriter David Frum and former Reagan administration official Kenneth L. Adelman.

Perle's prominent advocacy of invasion after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and his close relationship with the war's top architects, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy Defense secretary, and Douglas J. Feith, the former Pentagon policy chief — makes his reversal particularly noteworthy.

Perle told Vanity Fair he did not anticipate the "depravity" currently underway in Iraq, saying, "The levels of brutality we've seen are truly horrifying."

He said "huge mistakes" had been made in the management of the war, and he blamed disloyalty among top Bush administration officials for a failure to get the policy correct.

"The decisions did not get made that should have been," he said.

He continued: "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."

Although the excerpts do not show who Perle blames for disloyalty or mismanagement, he appears to lay the blame at the feet of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the military leaders who put together the war plan.

"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," he said.

"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."

The excerpts include quotes from other neoconservatives who have turned against the war, including Adelman, a longtime friend of Rumsfeld who has received classified Pentagon briefings on the war as recently as March, according to a recent book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Vanity Fair quotes Adelman as saying that though he still believes the reasons for going to war were right, the invasion should not have occurred because the goals were unachievable. He called Bush's national security advisors "among the most incompetent teams" in the post-World War II era, adding he was particularly let down by Rumsfeld: "I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance."


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peter.spiegel (at) latimes.com

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-neocons4nov04,0,855

Perle did more than "back" the war. He was instrumental to its creation. Let's not allow these criminals to escape their legal responsibilities.