Neocon Wormtongues Try To Fool Us Twice

The neoconservatives are desperate to preserve their Wormtongue power and their lucrative careers in the face of the dissolute failure of their vision in Iraq. So they have been carefully setting up, over the last few months, three lines of defense to sidestep the blame that is rightfully theirs. The first is to blame the Iraqis. The second is to blame those appeasing Democrats and their allies in the "liberal media". The third is to blame the Bush administration for being too incompetent to properly enact the Project for the New American Century.

On Thursday we were treated to Ralph Peters, who in a puke-making piece took the first mea non culpae to hacktacular new heights.

Yesterday it was the turn of a whole slew of former administration neocons to set out the strongest possible version of the third line of defense, in interviews with Vanity Fair. Biting the hands that they themselves fed are: Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman of Rummie's Defense Policy Board, Michael Rubin of the Office of Special Plans and the Provisional Coalition Authority and David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who coined the "axis of evil" line.

A group of neoconservatives led by former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Richard Perle and former Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman tell Vanity Fair that they blame the "dysfunctional" Bush administration for the "disaster" in Iraq and say that if they had it to do over again they would not advocate an invasion of Iraq.

Perle tells Vanity Fair that, "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.... [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him."

Adelman tells Vanity Fair that when he wrote in 2002 that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," he "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."

Amazingly, many conservatives are willing to swallow this. Andrew Sullivan for instance, who is happy that his friend Adelman has turned on Bush, Cheney and Rummie.

Thanks, Ken. You're a patriot. You've told the truth about men whom you know and care about. Because America comes first. And this country and its honor must be rescued from this incompetent cabal.

No, Adelman is no patriot. Nor is he any kind of nice person. Ian Welsh gets it right:

No. Sorry. At the end of the day, you Neocons made the argument for war, knowing who you had. Even by 2002 the incompetence of the Bush administration was clear, but you didn't care, because you thought the war would be a cakewalk. You don't get to redeem yourselves, or your failed idea of imposing democracy at the end of a bayonet, by pretending that it was just a good idea badly executed. The very nature of your world view required it to be badly executed, because you insisted on seeing nations such as Iraq as ready for Democracy, and as essentially similiar to nations like Japan, which indeed had democracy imposed on them.

Unable to deal in specifics rather than generalities; unable to notice differences in culture such as the huge factionalization of Iraqi society; unaware of the nature of the American military (hint: it wasn't then and isn't now an occupation military, in any fashion from doctrine to number of boots available); unable to see that the exiles you wanted to run the country and whom you relied on for information both had no power base in the country and every reason to lie to you, and, in short, your complete inability to see the world as the way it is, rather than the way you wanted it to be, meant that your judgement was fatally flawed. You, personally, each and every one of you, are implicit in the failure, because the failure was much bigger than just a few flawed people - it was based on a systemic misreading of the situation. Even the most competent team, if they took Neocon assumptions for how the world worked, would have failed.

Indeed.