Posted on 01/05/2007 5:06:00 AM PST by Thorin
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke.
For as he prepares to "surge" 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we "are not winning," his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations.
Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war that they, the "Vulcans," so brilliantly conceived.
Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9-11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bushite incompetence that fouled it up.
"The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," wails Ken Adelman, who had famously predicted in the Washington Post that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."
Bush's team of Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, says Adelman, "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Their incompetence, he adds, "means that most everything we ever stood for ... lies in ruins."
Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, whose book on war leaders Bush used to carry about, says his mistake was in not knowing "how incredibly incompetent" the Bush team would be.
Richard Perle is sickened by the consequences of the war he and his comrades so ardently championed. "The levels of brutality ... are truly horrifying, and, I have to say, I underestimated the depravity."
Calling the Bush policy process a "disaster," Perle blames Bush himself: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. ... I don't think he realizes the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
This is the second fallback position of the War Party. Not only incompetence, but treachery made a nightmare of their vision.
Uber-hawk Frank Gaffney also hits hard the theme of sabotage and disloyalty: "This president has tolerated, and the people around him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skullduggery that translates into subversion of his policies. ... He doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course."
David Frum, the cashiered White House speechwriter who co-authored the "axis-of-evil" phrase, faults the president. While he provided the words, says Frum, Bush "just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of maybe everything."
Where Frum, four years ago, accused anti-war conservatives of being "unpatriotic" haters of America and President Bush, he is now saying that that same president either lacked the I.Q. to realize what he was saying or lacked a belief and commitment to follow through.
As Rose writes, this is "the most damning assessment of all." Moreover, it is an indictment of Bush's judgment that he could clasp so many such vipers to his bosom.
Rose describes James Woolsey, the ex-CIA director who was ubiquitous on the op-ed pages and national TV making the case for war, as "aghast at what he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so painfully, 40 years ago" in Vietnam.
Conspicuous by its absence from disparagements of the president by these deserters from his camp and cause is any sense that they were themselves wrong. That they, who accuse everyone else of cutting and running, are themselves cutting and running. That they are themselves but a typical cluster of think-tank incompetents.
No neocon concedes that the very idea itself of launching an unprovoked war against a country in the heart of the Arab world – one that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us – might not be wildly welcomed by the "liberated." No neocon has yet conceded that Bismarck may have been right when he warned, "Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death."
"Huge mistakes were made," says Perle, "and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives. ... I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war."
Almost all the neoconservatives have now departed the seats of power in the Bush administration and retreated to their sinecures at Washington think tanks, to plot the next war – on Iran.
Meanwhile, brave young Americans, the true idealists and the casualties of the neocons' war, come home in caskets, 20 a week, to Dover and, at Walter Reed, learn to walk again on steel legs.
Sour grapes Pat or are you just a miserable SOB?
Ungghhh...Pat gets wilder by the day.
If we just shut the borders and cut ourselves off from the world all our woes would go away /sarc
we don't kill enough people
Shutting our borders would be a good start!
Why doesn't the president want to do this?
isn't Bush supposed to be a neoconservative, with less support from paleoconservatives?
As for the politicians--they're politicians; they go where the votes are.
GWB has formed the homeland security dept, doubled the border patrol and has placed NG on the border and all people do is whine.
He's done more than Buchanan to control the border
They were also assurred that the comments would not come out until after the election (the fools).
Of course he has done more than Buchanan. He is the President.
We have a disaster going on at our borders. President Bush could do a lot to stop it. He has not. Why?
At this point, it's not longer the Iraq War. It's a war with Iran, which is really the enemy we needed to take on in the first place. So let's get it done.
Unghhh.... He's done more than any president in my lifetime.
The border is a problem, but give the man his due.
The best way to control the "border problem" (code for illegal mexicans is to pressure Mexico into political and social reform.
They wouldnt covet what we have if they hade hope there.
Actually, no.
Here on FR the number of arrests at the southern border broken down by year have been posted. The numbers were much much higher under Clinton. They dropped immediately after President Bush took office.
Perhaps some other freeper remembers where those data came from.
SHUT UP PAT! You have no credibility, since all you offer is negativity 24/7 and unrealistic kook solutions. Anyone can be a critic...
OK I have to go to work.
All I have to say to the border crowd is get out there and get busy. The minutemen have shown you the way.
I did it when I lived on the border.
We have a disaster going on at our borders. President Bush could do a lot to stop it. He has not. Why?
True, they may not be the Best team to work together & they do have major differing opinions.
But they're not complete airheads or dimwits.
*to which I suggest that Buchanen look in a mirror one of these days.
I agree. The ILLEGAL immigration will be the death of this nation. Bush is encouraging it. Signed a treaty to give ILLEGAL worked Social Security benefits -screwing the hard-working citizens of this country.
I am disgusted by his betrayal.
__________________________________________________________
Absolutely. Bush's continuing betrayal of his country to Mexico is criminal...and now, this secret deal with Mexico on Social Security. The man needs to be impeached and thrown out of office for treason.
Please, God...no more Bushes!
No, he is claiming that the neocons are saying that. His position is that the war wasn't winnable no matter who ran it.
Pat is just plain loosing it. I think pat has gone off the deep end. I was reading this and thought this has to come from some standard issue leftist looney, not some self proclaimed conservative.
Pat ran under the old reform party when it was flooded with communists. Pat needs the defeat PERSONALLY because victory is bad for is political captial bottom line.
A few generations from now, descendents of crypto-Nazis will be hardly distinguishable, if at all, from their Arab relatives.
if buchanan was serious about the border he would be using his "star power" by joining the minute men.
groundhog day!
I made it through a few paragraphs and then gave up and scrolled to comments....and sure nuff...it was another article from PITY-PAT!!
I got to where I could spot a DEBKA article from five words away, but Pat still sneaks up on me as if it is a regular MSM hate-Bush article.
Pat's underlying argument is: "My disloyalty to America and to America's Commander-in-Chief is excusable, because other people who never shred my cowardice before appear to be chickening out as well."
Brilliant, Pat.
Go crawl back in bed with Lenora Fulani and whisper sweet Marxist (oops, "fair trade") nothings into her ear.
Candyass.
Nutty Pat is off his meds...again!
"Huge mistakes were made," says Perle, "and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives. ... I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war."
Richard Perle is a thoroughly discredited and disgraced @sshole on a number of different points, but his defensive posture on this issue is comical. He actually started covering his @ss on this war before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. Some quick research into his public statements in the months leading up to the invasion will reveal that his assessment of the number of U.S. troops needed to topple Saddam Hussein ranged from 0 (yes, that's ZERO) to 250,000 -- which means he never had a f#cking clue what he was talking about.
The biggest mistake the Bush administration ever made was allowing morons like this to get within 500 miles of Washington, D.C. in 2001.
You are.
And all the other losers who feel the need to post on a thread about how "irrelevant" Buchanan is. If he were truly irrelevant, they would ignore him, not gather together to proclaim his irrelevance.
Of course, none bother trying to refute his argument, which is irrefutable: the neocons egged Bush on to invade Iraq, and now they blame Bush for all the problems in Iraq, taking none of the responsibility themselves. What a cowardly and despicable crew the neocons are.
Claiming that someone who disagrees with American foreign policy is "disloyal" to America is an argument worthy of Leonid Brezhnev. The American government is not America, as the founders well understood.
Nor is Buchanan or any other American civilian required to follow the President. The President is not a king or emperor, another fact the founders well understood. Were those Americans who opposed Clinton's disastrous war in the Balkans "disloyal to America and to America's Commander-in-Chief," too?
They apparently decided to imitate the palaeoconservatives.
Disloyalty? Check.
Cowardice? Check.
All they need now is to cultivate a complete ignorance of economics and a paranoiac fear of Jews and Mexicans.
Then they will be able to hobnob with Lew Rockwell, Paul Craig Roberts, Charley Reese, Pat Buchanan, Justin Raimondo and all the rest of the palaeo elite.
Looks to me like Adelmann and Gaffney are dead-bang on. The War was won. It was the Peace that was lost through White House/State Dept. hand-cuffing and enfeeblements afraid of "collateral damage", and a brain-dead idea of letting Iraq fester and produce...an Islamic "constitution".
Pat would have personally surrendered to Hitler.
We're not discussing trade agreements or treaty negotiations.
We're talking about American soldiers in the field being stabbed in the back by cowardly pundits.
Were those Americans who opposed Clinton's disastrous war in the Balkans "disloyal to America and to America's Commander-in-Chief," too?
The Commander-In-Chief, when committing troops to war, should give some clue as to his ultimate objective.
President Clinton seemed more motivated to please Europe than to tell the American people what the goal was.
That being said, once troops were on the ground, there is no justification for maligning their ability to succeed. That's disloyalty. I did not allow my personal distaste for President Clinton to transform me into a cheerleader for the failure of America's armed forces.
While I was not confident in what President Clinton thought he was doing - I wish he'd told us clearly - I was supremely confident in our soldiers' and marines' ability to successfully complete their tactical assignments.
My personal opinion was that Milosevic had to go and that simply containing him was pointless in the long run - but I did not believe for a second that America's fighting forces could not successfully contain him.
And they did contain him.
You're talking about yourself. What a kook. You didn't read his article.
Bump. Indeed. What's the count of propagandists on FR against Buchanan so far? I wonder who writes their paychecks. This definitely appears to be too orchestrated. What are they afraid of? That he might actually return to the GOP and blast the RINOs pretending to be just barely conservative enough for the Base to somehow forget all the betrayals and back-stabbing...and let bygones be bygones? Conservatives will never get behind supporting McCain? Romney? Giuliani? Pataki? Sheesh!
Conspicuous by its absence from disparagements of the president by these deserters from his camp and cause is any sense that they were themselves wrong. That they, who accuse everyone else of cutting and running, are themselves cutting and running. That they are themselves but a typical cluster of think-tank incompetents.
No neocon concedes that the very idea itself of launching an unprovoked war against a country in the heart of the Arab world – one that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us – might not be wildly welcomed by the "liberated." No neocon has yet conceded that Bismarck may have been right when he warned, "Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death."
good read ping
At least he'll get plenty of votes in Palm Beach County. ;)
You know why.
One of the basic precepts of conservatism is that "we" does not mean "our government". "We" can mean us as individuals, as corporations, as private institutions, etc.
Pat has never argued that "we" should seal ourselves off from the rest of the world. All he has been asking is that one subset of "we", namely our overgrown quasi-socialistic, quasi-imperialistic government should spend less time engaging the rest of the world and more time doing what we are paying them to do: namely protect us from bad guys at the lowest possible cost.
When conservatives start equating "we" with our government then we may as well just be Pelosi's bitches.
I dropped Pat from my reading list long ago. He is nothing but a reactionary and alarmist about everything. Never right about anything. Not even worth the mouse click.
Then put him up for office, instead of being paid by the Anti-American liberal media.
re look at your map.Then re read Saddams last 12 years of terrorist influence.No, we did just right geographically.
Soon Iran will have canoes but no paddles or paddlers
by design
WRONG! I did read it.
I was trying to make a point about conservatism and all you can come up with is ad hominem.
I hope that one day Pat Buchanan says something like "it is good to breathe on a regular basis."
That way people who are unable to argue rationally and can only deal with life emotionally will be forced to either wise-up or cease to exist.
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