January issue Vanity Fair: "Neo Culpa"

[npincus]

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

Excerpts from the full article by David Rose were posted prior to the election; the full she-bang will be on the newstands next week in the January issue of Vanity Fair, a symphony of regret and blame from the chorus of neo-cons that dreamed up this catastrophe in Iraq.

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."

I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.

I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.

[acmavm]

1. WTF??? "...that Bush's arguments are absolutely right,"...

Screw this guy. The prospective wholesale slaughter of any innocent civilians by invasion and occupation, for any reason is unacceptable.

And once again, that was not the primary reason for the invasion. Domination of the Middle East and the oil and natural gas field, that's where you'll find the real motivating factors.

edit: That article just pissed me off to no end. It's just a pathetic attempt to pull the individual reputations of the neocons out of the garbage bin of history (where they belong) and make it sound like these bastards were decent, patriotic, altruistic, caring, concerned mega-citizens just trying to do their best for mankind.

Screw that nonsense. They were, AND ARE, criminals. Each and every one of them.

[aquart]

2. Adelman shows himself to be a stupid tool.

Installing a puppet government, forcing it to write contracts advantageous to neocon cronies is using our "power for moral good"?

What did he think those 16 huge bases we were building in Iraq were for? Tourism?

[OregonBlue]

3. What he said!

[mike_c]

4. the neoconservative foreign policy is utterly bankrupt...

...and fundamentally WRONG. Adelman doesn't get that. What he calls "using U.S. military power to do moral good" is perceived by the victims of that policy as invasion and conquest. He would spawn wars of aggression without a second thought, then bemoan their poor implementation? What a fuckwit.