The Resurection of the Neocons

Someone fetch me a wooden stake and a mallet. The time is nigh to kill the Neocon movement once and for all. They have been totally, 100% wrong in absolutely everything they have engaged in up to this point so why in hell would anyone consider acting on their advice ever again? I'm still working out a just and fitting punishment for the singularly craven adherents of that particular nihilistic political philosophy.

It's the remnants of the Neocon movement (like Bill Kristol) firmly ensconced at think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, who are behind the call for a troop buildup and escalation of hostilities. That, in and of itself, is sufficient grounds to reject the notion as feckless folly.

And since I brought up the AEI, lets have some new rules for just who exactly gets to call themselves a think tank, whaddya say? For instance, if you have been irrefutably wrong in every policy position you have advocated, you don't get to call yourself a think tank. Likewise, if you advocated a preemptive war and scornfully disregarded warnings that a civil war would be the end result, you don't get to call yourself a think tank.

Personally, I can't get over the chutzpah. The good ship Neocon proved less seaworthy than the SS Minnow and Gilligan looked like Admiral Nelson in contrast to the abilities of the neocons to write and enact policy.

I told you there would be a Friday news dump

Hat tip to Pale Rider for hipping me to the Friday newsdump. It's the resignation of Neocon Pentagon intelligence official Stephen Cambone.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's top intelligence official and a close ally of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will step down at the end of the year, becoming the first key department member to leave in the wake of Rumsfeld's resignation.

It had been widely speculated that Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, would resign as the Pentagon prepares for the expected Senate confirmation of a new defense chief -- former CIA Director Robert Gates.

The Pentagon's intelligence-gathering has come under fire during Cambone's tenure, with critics accusing the Defense Department of trying to take expanded control over the nation's intelligence activities.

Cambone was in charge of intelligence when it was disclosed a year ago that a Pentagon database of suspicious activities contained the names of anti-war groups that had been found not be security risks. Cambone ordered a review of the program.

More tomorrow when the Times arrives and tells me more than the AP blurb. Anyway, this isn't the first Friday newsdump and it won't be the last, but it is one of the more significant. Cambrone has been in the midst of everything the DoD has done lately that has an air of "wrong" about it, right up to and including Abu Ghraib.

Five will get you ten that General Karpinski said something in her testimony this week that hastened his departure. What'll ya bet?

Walls fall down

Well now, really. What did we expect from rats? They always desert the sinking ship. Now the architects of the Mess in Mesopotamia are turning on the administration in droves. Some brief excerpts from the Vanity Fair article from October 2006.

Richard Perle

Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, blames the unfolding catastrophe on a central cause: dysfunction within the Bush administration. Perle states, "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.…"

Kenneth Adelman

"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."

Michael Rubin

"Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

David Frum

David Frum is the mastermind who dreamed up the 2002 State of the Union address, the so-called "Axis of Evil" speech.

It now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush. Frum goes on "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."

Eliot Cohen

"I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

Frank Gaffney

"[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home.

Those are some pretty strong statements coming from those who cooked up the grand cock-up.







The cover of the October issue of Vanity Fair was quite delicious, too. They punked The Weekly Standard with a cover-flap. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when neo-con adherents realized they had been scammed.

The Times of London: Time to get out of Iraq

HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.

Matthew Parris said that very well. Love those Brits when they set out to paint a word-picture.

They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

I swear to God - I wrote about Suez before I read this editorial. But I admit to feeling giddy at this moment - if I am on the same page with Matthew Parris, I'm likely to be downright insufferable for a bit.

It is no small thing to have embellished the philosophy, found the prose and made the case for the most almighty cock-up in politics that we are ever likely to witness. They meant for the best, these politicians, dreamers and writers. They didn’t think it would end like this. But it has: more killed than even Saddam could boast, and nothing to show for it but an exhausted British Army and the global energising of violent Islamism on a scale of which Osama bin Laden never dreamt.
Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .
“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”
Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

And then we - the United States - are alone in Iraq with 16 Dominicans and a Russian advisor.

As Parris so aptly analogized, the ship has hit the rocks and is going down. The Brits, who have a history in the region that they should have reminded their own Neocon chuckleheads about before they sailed into these dangerous waters, are more prone to take the long view. But they have a more informed populace who is more likeley to remind then that

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.
Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.
We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

Dannat speaking up was no slip-up. The Brits are out by 01 March.