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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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November 3rd, 2006 - Neo Culpa |
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By David Rose Vanity Fair November 3, 2006 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. 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." Perle goes so far as to say
that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of
Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today,
and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would
have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing
that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam
had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not
in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct.
Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military
intervention? Well, maybe we could have." Having spoken with Perle, I
wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much
caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do
his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out
because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people,
found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle
East. I expect to encounter
disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence
of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest
hope. To David Frum, the former
White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address
that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," 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. 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. Richard Perle: "In the
administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense
under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the
decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among
disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not
make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally
ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving
[Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice] as part of the family." Michael Ledeen, American
Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most
powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with
the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes." Frank Gaffney, an assistant
secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for
Security Policy: "[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. It also
creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity." Kenneth Adelman: "The
most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day
that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director]
George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority
chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer - three of the most incompetent people who've ever
served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president
can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration.
It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious
people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those
three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq." David Frum: "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." Michael Rubin, former
Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer:
"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." Richard Perle: "Huge
mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by
neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly
almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad.
I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was
in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do
that.' I had no responsibility for that." Kenneth Adelman: "The
problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job. …
Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be
lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.…
I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his
houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very,
very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were
we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I
don't know. He certainly fooled me." Eliot Cohen, director of the
strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "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." David Rose is a Vanity Fair
contributing editor. External link:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612 |