Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

No, The Neocons Don't Get to Weasel Out OfThis One.
The rats are trying to save themselves:

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."

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 is specifics rather than generalities; unable to notice differences in cultureo 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 who 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. (Of course, that's an oxymoron, since any competent team would have examined the assumptions and discovered they were bullshit.)

The nature of the neocon dream, because of its very utopian disconnect from the real world, meant that when implemented, it was bound to fail.

So no, Perle; no Adelman; blaming Bush is not a "get out of jail free card". Your very world view was the problem, not just Bush and his team's incompetence. The fact that Bush was incompetent was necessary for implementation of your dreams, because no one competent would have done what you wanted.


By Ian Welsh 2006-11-03 18:43


URL: http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20061103/no_the_neocons_dont_get_to_weasel_out_ofthis_one
Links:
[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612