Vanity Fair: Neo Culpa: Now They Tell Us: Neoconservatives Cut and Run

There is a fascinating article by David Rose on the Vanity Fair web site entitled "Neo Culpa" which reveals that a number of the prominent Neoconservatives who had lobbied so heavily for the "liberation" of Iraq are now blaming the administration for incompetence and claiming that they themselves are in no away responsible for what has happened. It's called "Cut and Run." The article is actually a short teaser for the full article which will appear in the January issue of Vanity Fair in December. The subtitle paragraph says it all:

Led by Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, the war's neoconservative architects blast the Bush administration for what even they call the "disaster" in Iraq.

Kenneth Adelman is the Neocon who famously predicted that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."

It is really tough to swallow the sentiment that such a prominent figure who had the ear of President Bush and the administration and so many members of Congress is now doing a 180-degree turn:

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."

Yes, the liberation aspect was a relative "cakewalk." Creation of a stable Democracy was never a part of the Neocon game plan. As President Bush famously proclaimed in the 2000 presidential debates, American armed forces are for warfighting, not nation-building.

-- Jack Krupansky