Neo Culpa - Perle Concedes Iraq Disaster...

[bridgit]

'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.

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."' http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

[Phredicles]

1. Guess ya backed the wrong horse, huh DICK?

The neo-con reunion meeting at The Hague won't be complete without him. What a buttbrain.

[buff2]

2. Can it get any worse for that blabbering idiot?

Khrist.....that's really bad when his neo-cons are turning on him too. Looks like all he's going to have left supporting him is Condi and his dawg. Globe tab says Mrs. xanax Stepford is ready to file divorce papers...says she's had enough of his "close" relationship with Condi and says she thinks her moron of a husband "may be drinking again". Duh...


BTW.....I've seen a lot of scary pics of bu$h.....but the one in this article is the scariest one yet. YIKES!!! :scared:

[Octafish]

3. The neocons did a BAAAD thing.

And Perle's still a sweetheart of a warmonger.

From VF:

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."

Great article, bridgit!

And the photographs by Annie Leibovitz and Nigel Parry are spot-on.

Thank you for sharing.

[Nevernose]

4. Title's worthy of Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker

That is a VERY sharp wit at work.