Vanity Fair: Neo Culpa (or Now They Tell Us)

[kskiska]

…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.

(snip)

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."

(snip)

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."

(snip)

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."

(snip)

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 , Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

more…
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. YOW!

Kaboom. :nuke:

[denverbill]

3. You nailed that. What a story! n/t

[pscot]

2. So the architects of the policy

are now exonerating themselves of all culpability. Rumsfeld and Cheney were their guys. They had their own directorate inside the pentagon. Chalabi was their creature. They helped to cook the books on WMD. If only the Preznit hadn't been such a schlub... What a steaming pile of horsemanure.

[hedda_foil]

4. Well ya see guys,

Anybody who's dysfunctional enough to act on your lame-brain schemes is sure as hell too dysfunctional to make your lame brain ideas work. You weren't called the crazies all these years for nothing.

[bemildred]

5. Time to look for the next sucker, I guess. nt

[Senator]

6. They're all scuffling at the door of the Bus to the Hague ...

... trying to push each other in first.

There's plenty of room boys an girls. You really might want to get in first though. Only the few rear seats protect you from being stabbed in the back.

Impeachment, prosecution, and war crime punishment are the only way we can avoid a repeat performance in the next generation; or sooner.

--

[Tom Joad]

7. The scary thing is now they will expect Dems to more competently

carry out the same agenda. And even more scary, all too many Dems would be all too willing to do so.

[Tom Joad]

8. Fuck them. They can go rot in hell.

[fat dad]

9. Forgive me for this but

I feel the ugly heat of extreme anti-Zionism bubbling up in me. I can't help it, I'm just an ignorant blue-collar American. Someone talk me down from this malinformed ledge.

[bemildred]

10. Neocons do the `rat backstroke'

---

If the statements of Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and other Iraq policy architects quoted in a Vanity Fair article are to be believed, they are frantically doing the "rat backstroke" as Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld are left on the sinking ship. Only if he had "Delphic" oracular powers would Perle have predicted the catastrophic outcome — due, he says, to a dysfunctional administration. He should have checked in with the many millions of non-Delphic Americans who clearly predicted the present situation in Iraq.

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