Top Neocons Turn On Bush

Posted on November 3, 2006

Vanity Fair has a blockbuster of an article entitled: "Neo Culpa" in which the chief neoconservatives -- Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and David Frum -- turn on President Bush and flatly call him and his administration "incompetent." These are the top neocons, including the true architect of the Iraq War, Richard Perle. It's a shocking article and doesn't bode well for the White House. First up is Richard Perle, the most gung ho Pentagon insider who advocated military action to topple Saddam Hussein and who told everyone that the invasion would be easy and that we would be greeted as liberators.

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."
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."

Of course, it has been conclusively proven that Saddam Hussein did not have any WMD whatseover, but even if Saddam had them, Perle now says that the whole thing could have been handled other than militarily. Now he tells us.

Kenneth Adelman has an equally vicious take on President Bush's competence.

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."
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."

Even David Frum, the speechwriter who coined the infamous "axis of evil" phrase for one of Bush's speeches has now decided that it wasn't his ideas that were so bad, it was just that his former boss is not so smart, saying:

"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."

It's certainly true that the execution of the Iraq War has demonstrated the shocking degree of incomptence. But for the chief idea-masters to now whine to Vanity Fair that their ideas were great, but someone else messed up the game plan is laughable. There is enough blame for everyone here to share. Only working together in concert could the neocons with their grandiose ideas of America forcibly spreading democracy to cultures that aren't ready for it and the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika with its amazingly inept execution of those misguided ideas create this full-blown debacle that is Iraq. It really was a team effort.