Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us

[Marrak]

<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612>
Neo Culpa
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.
by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006
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."

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."

<>

[ClintonTyree]

1. "Opposition and disloyalty in his administration"?

:wtf: What the fuck has Perle been smoking? Everything this administration wanted, it got. He's correct about who's to blame: our bone-head in chief, Bush. But opposition and disloyalty within his own administration? :banghead: Go take a long walk off a short pier, Perle! :grr:

[hippiechick]

2. 'cuz the looting and pillaging of the national treasury is over ...

... the honey pot's empty and the war profiteers are getting to the point of diminishing returns. Time to call it a "mistake" and GTF outta dodge so that someone else can clean it up.

[ClintonTyree]

3. That's pretty much it, right on the head.

Get someone else to clean up the mess. And by the time Democrats get it cleaned up the American public will have forgotten who got us in that mess in the first place and they'll vote in another bunch of lying, stealing neo-cons again. And around and around we'll go.....

[ima_sinnic]

4. oh right! like the useful idiot wasn't just the puppet for all of you

incompetent "grand designing" assholes. Even just having a "grand design" proves you're an unconscienable, shit-headed, arrogant, prick asshole who should be locked up with the rest of your traitorous, lying, greed-head pig conspirators. Don't try to make it look like it's The Naked Emperor's fault! He's YOUR boy, pig, and YOU will be tried for treason and war crimes like everybody else.

And by the way, you HAVE stolen a huge portion of the National Treasury, so don't go all boo-hooing about how Georgie Boy messed up and made it so you couldn't get it ALL. We The People want that back, you know. :grr:

[Doctor_J]

5. Disloyalty?

this is a joke, right? Like 'we would have won the war if it had been fought liek Smirk wanted it to be fought'. How stoopid do these wingers think the Fox News watchers are?

[Ecumenist]

6. pretty?

:evilgrin:

[tech3149]

7. Remember those name well and long

Any of the original supporting cast for this administration (s'cuse me misadministration) should never be allowed to have any influence on domestic or foreign policy. Anyone who didn't walk away from this misadministration in the first year is either an enabler looking to improve their own position or a totally delusional sycophant that doesn't care what damage is done by following their beliefs. In both cases, they are a threat to the ideals of this nation and should be dealt with in that fashion. Document all the original administrations supporting staff and remember them well. Should any candidate for public office employ them or have some association that suggests a common viewpoint, ti is just reason to disqualify them for any public office.

[Barrett808]

8. Neo Culpa: Perle, Frum, Adelman turn on Bush

Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us

Neo Culpa

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.

by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006

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."

...

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."

(more)

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

[Rick Myers]

9. All the NeoCons should suffer endlessly!

Perle and company are TRAITORS and Enemies of The State!

[ima_sinnic]

10. dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x244138

[jimshoes]

11. Absolutely, all of the architects and war pimps

that pushed this war on a hoodwinked, fear ravaged populace should be arrested and held pending trial in the Hague as war criminals. The whole PNAC crew and the entire bush administration. Then we should have a good look at the K-Street whores and the elected representatives that helped bleed the treasury dry. Then we can have a good look at the Halliburtons and KBR's and a few defense industries. It's time to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs perhaps.

[Eugene]

12. Ah, finger pointing! It wasn't just the execution. The whole idea was wrong.

Their assumptions on the use of brute force as a tool of foreign policy
were wrong. That's the point they stubbornly refuse to get.

"We didn't realize that George Bush is an idiot" is not a valid excuse.
This disaster was a team effort and they were active and enthusiastic
members of that team. Perle helped make policy. Frum wrote the propaganda.
The neocon think tanks helped Ahmed Chalabi and others peddle their lies.

They're acting like rats jumping off a sinking ship.

K & R

[Senator]

13. 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 and 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.

--

[Vidar]

14. How's the weather in Nuremburg?