Neo Culpa

[JLM]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612?printable=true&currentPage=all


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

Richard Perle. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

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."

George W. Bush. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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."

Dick Cheney. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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."

Donald Rumsfeld. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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."

Condoleezza Rice. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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."

"—the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"

Didn't that quaint concept used to be the domain of liberals like Woodrow Wilson?

[Business_Casual]

I think the neo-cons they interviewed have all pretty much said their words were twisted or selectively quoted. Check the refutations on Drudge and National Review.

M_P

[VA_Dinger]

Thats one interesting article.

[JLM]

MP, do you have a link to the NRO stuff?

I wonder how you could possibly take some of those statements 'out of context'.


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."

Is there another context into which you could place that?

Seriously thou, I would like to see what the said on NRO.

[Business_Casual]

To that end:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzgxYzUzYmRlNjhmNzMyNjI2MDM4YmRjNTFhODA4MGQ=

http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGIyM2M4NzFlNTQwN2QxNzU0MDg4MjNiMjMwYjk4Zjk=

M_P

[JLM]

Thank you. For the sake of balance let's just throw it out here:


Vanity Unfair
A response to Vanity Fair.

An NRO Symposium

Editor's Note: On Friday, Vanity Fair issued a press release highlighting excerpts of a piece in their January issue on “neoconservative” supporters of the war in Iraq who today, unsurprisingly, have some negative things to say about how the war is going and how the Bush administration has been handling it.

In the wake of the press release – which has gotten considerable play on the Internet – some of those “neoconservatives” highlighted in the article have responded to the excerpts and its misrepresentations, in some cases, of what they said. We collect some of those reactions — including from Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Michael Rubin — below.

N.B. This symposium has been amended since posting (to include additional respondents). — KJL


Eliot A. Cohen
Being neither Republican nor Democrat, and thinking the government's conduct of the Iraq war an entirely appropriate subject of political debate I do not think anyone should have kept mum in an interview of this kind until an election had passed. That said, I had assumed that the interview would not be published until January, and find the timing of this release of excerpts tendentious, to say the least.

I stand by what I said, however, which is no different from what I have said in other venues, including in articles in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal as well a in a variety of print and television interviews over several years. Indeed, insofar as I have any personal regrets as I look back on my public statements about the war, it is for not having spoken up even more often and forcefully than I already have. I believed in 2003 that the war was just and appropriate, and have been deeply distressed at its conduct. There is no public service, however, in misleading ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves, or in softening critiques which are necessary if we are to do better in the future.

— Eliot A. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.


David Frum
There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report . Headlined “Now They Tell Us,” it purports to offer an “exclusive” access to “remorseful” former supporters of the Iraq war who will now “play the blame game” with “shocking frankness.”

It cites not only myself as one of these remorseful supporters, but also Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, and others.

I can speak only for myself. Obviously I wish the war had gone better. It’s true I fear that there is a real danger that the US will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of US policy.

I have made these points literally thousands of times since 2004, beginning in An End to Evil and most recently in my 22-part commentary on Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (start here and find the remainder here.) I have argued them on radio and on television and on public lectern, usually in exactly the same words that are quoted in the press release.

“[T]he 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.”

“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.”

And finally that the errors in Iraq are explained by “failures at the center.”

Nothing exclusive there, nothing shocking, and believe me, nothing remorseful.

My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous.

And that to my knowledge is the view of everybody quoted in the release and the piece: Adelman, Cohen, Ledeen, Perle, Pletka, Rubin, and all the others.

(Not that it matters, but this fight is very personal for many of those people. Cohen and Ledeen have both had children serve in Iraq, Cohen’s in the Tenth Mountain Division, Ledeen’s daughter in the civil administration and his elder son in the Marines. As a civilian adviser in Iraq, Rubin displayed impressive personal courage living solo for long periods of time in the Shiite zones of east Baghdad.)

Vanity Fair then set my words in its own context in its press release. They added words outside the quote marks to change the plain meaning of quotations.

When I talk in the third quotation above about failures “at the center,” for example, I did not mean the president. If I had, I would have said so. At that point in the conversation, I was discussing the National Security Council, whose counter-productive interactions produced bad results.

And when I talked in the second quotation about “persuading the president,” I was repeating this point, advanced here last month. In past administrations, the battle for the president’s words was a battle for administration policy. But because Bush’s National Security Council malfunctioned so badly, the president could say things without action following - because the mechanism for enforcing his words upon the bureaucracy had broken.

In short, Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over “how to correct course and win the war” to advance obsessions all their own.

How was this done?

The author of the piece touted by the press release is David Rose, a British journalist well known as a critic of the Saddam Hussein regime and supporter of the Iraq war. (See here and here for just two instances out of a lengthy bibliography.)

Rose has earned a reputation as a truth teller. The same unfortunately cannot be said for the editors and publicists at Vanity Fair. They have repackaged truths that a war-fighting country needs to hear into lies intended to achieve a shabby partisan purpose.

— David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This originally appeared on “David Frum’s Diary” on NRO.


Frank Gaffney
In the annals of political dirty tricks, last weekend’s bait-and-switch caper perpetrated by Vanity Fair will probably be but a footnote. Still, the magazine deserves contempt for having made promises it had no intention of honoring, promises about facilitating a serious discussion of President Bush’s efforts to fight our Islamofascist foes in Iraq and elsewhere by some of the most adamant supporters of those efforts. None of us who responded candidly on the basis of such promises to thoughtful questions posed by reporter David Rose would likely have done so had the magazine’s true and nakedly partisan purpose been revealed.

Perhaps we should have known better, given Vanity Fair’s generally venal character. We were encouraged to overlook that sordid record, however, on the grounds that the author would be Rose — a journalist who had earned a reputation of late for fair and honest treatment of matters such as this. It is all the more discomfiting that — in the wake of the magazine’s misleading press release released last weekend which selectively quotes from an as-yet-uncompleted-and-unpublished article — Rose failed to respond honestly when asked by an NPR reporter on Sunday morning why Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, David Frum, and others had “chosen this time” to criticize President Bush and his war effort. The correct answer was we had not “chosen” this time to do so. Rather, Rose’s editors had selected this juncture in the election cycle to publicize our respective views in the worst possible light. Transparently, their hope was that such a premature and selective release would further undermine at the polls both President Bush’s party and a war Vanity Fair does not support.

As with others, I find myself being quoted not only out of context but making remarks that have — albeit in more fulsome ways — been said by me many times before. As with their remarks, mine have been part of the texture of the debate about Iraq for years. They do not reflect remorse about effort to help free the long-suffering people of that country, and others under Islamofascist assault, let alone a so-called “neo-culpa.”

For the record, I remain convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a necessary and laudable measure to prevent a megalomaniac from handing off to terrorists weapons of mass destruction for the purpose of attacking us and our allies. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. government has proof that Saddam Hussein had precisely such plans ready to implement. In fact, such evidence was actually documented in the Iraq Survey Group’s final report released last year with much obscuring fanfare about the absence of recovered WMDs.

I am also as committed as ever to the consolidation of the fully justified liberation of Iraq. I have repeatedly urged the president, both in person and through other channels, to make use of the full panoply of economic, financial, political, and military measures — a true War Footing — necessary to achieve it. Those who would have us do otherwise are deceiving us and/or themselves. This is true whether they are a) Democratic politicians so hungry for power that they are willing to compel our defeat in Iraq, without regard for the ultimate costs to the country; or b) Republicans like former Secretary of State James Baker, who insist we must negotiate with enemies like Iran and Syria to “secure their help” in the country that they, among others, are doing so much to destabilize.

Finally, I am persuaded that President Bush wants to do the right thing, just as he says he does. What is mystifying to me and to many of my colleagues is why, then, has he repeatedly allowed subordinates who do not want him successfully to act on his principles to continue to hold senior posts, and to get away with undermining him and his policies. As I have said and written many times in recent years, such tolerance — and the incoherent thinking and irresolute behavior associated with it — confuses the American people, emboldens our enemies and alienates our friends. We hope by pointing out these shortcomings to help sensible, capable people do better, not to encourage their replacement with people who are clueless about this war and/or truly incompetent with respect to its prosecution.

I trust that these convictions, and those of others interviewed by Rose, will be accurately reflected when he finally has his full article published — hopefully, without the subterfuge and spin that characterized the publication of this press release about it.

— Frank J. Gaffney Jr. held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department. He currently is president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.


Michael Ledeen
My experience with Vanity Fair is even more extensive than David Frum ‘s, having been the subject of a 30,000 word screed that ends with the author’s bland confession “there is no evidence for any of this.” So I am not at all surprised to see the editors yank words from me, David, and others out of context and totally misdescribe what we think, do and feel. I do not feel “remorseful,” since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place and I advocated — as I still do — support for political revolution in Iran as the logical and necessary first step in the war against the terror masters.

Readers of NRO know well how disappointed I have been with our failure to address Iran, which was, and remains, the central issue, and it has been particularly maddening to live through extended periods when our children were in battle zones where Iranian-supported terrorists were using Iranian-made weapons against Americans, Iraqis and Afghans. I have been expressing my discontent for more than three years. So much for a change of heart dictated by developments on the ground.

So it is totally misleading for Vanity Fair to suggest that I have had second thoughts about our Iraq policy. But then one shouldn’t be surprised. No one ever bothered to check any of the lies in the first screed, and obviously no fact-checker was involved in the latest “promotion.” I actually wrote to David Rose, the author of the article-to-come, a person for whom I have considerable respect. He confirmed that words attributed to me in the promo had been taken out of context.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
This originally appeared in NRO’s The Corner.


Richard Perle
Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday’s election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.

I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country.

I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government. As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real, would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from Iraq.

I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan before 9/11.

I believed we should not repeat that mistake with Saddam Hussein, that we could not responsibly ignore the threat that he might make weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists who would use them to kill Americans. I favored removing his regime. And despite the current difficulties, I believed, and told Mr. Rose, that “if we had left Saddam in place, and he had shared nerve gas with al Qaeda, or some other terrorist organization, how would we compare what we’re experiencing now with that?”

I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path.

— Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as chairman of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board during this administration.


Michael Rubin
Some people interviewed for the piece are annoyed because they granted interviews on the condition that the article not appear before the election. Vanity Fair is spinning a series of long interviews detailing the introspection and debate that occurs among responsible policymakers every day into a pre-election hit job. Who doesn’t constantly question and reassess? Vanity Fair’s agenda was a pre-election hit job, and I guess some of us quoted are at fault for believing too much in integrity. What the article seeks to do is push square pegs into round holes. Readers will see that the content of the piece does not match the sensational headlines. Were people gathered around the author gripping about Bush? No. Were people identifying faults in the implementation? Yes. Are people sick of the autodafe whereby pundits demand “neocon” confessions to fit their own silly conspiracy theories? Yes. Have those interviewed changed their mind about the war? I have not, no matter how self-serving partisan pundits or lazy journalists want to spin it. I can’t speak for others. Again, despite the punditry out there, the so-called neocons are not Borg.

Now, for my own quote: I absolutely stand by what I said. Too many people in Washington treat foreign policy as a game. Many Washington-types who speak about Iraq care not about the U.S. servicemen or about the Iraqis, but rather focus on U.S. electoral politics. I am a Republican, but whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power, Washington’s word must mean something. Leadership is about responsibility, not just politics. We cannot go around the world betraying our allies — in this case Iraqis who believed in us or allied with us — just because of short-term political expediency. This is not just about Iraq: If we abandon Iraq, we will not only prove correct all of Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric about the US being a paper tiger, but we will also demonstrate — as James Baker and George H. W. Bush did in 1991 — that listening to the White House and alliance with the United States is a fool’s decision. We can expect no allies anywhere, be they in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, if we continue to sacrifice principles to short-term realist calculations. It’s not enough to have an attention span of two years, when the rest of the world thinks in decades if not centuries.

[Submariner]

Francis 'Fortunate Son' Guillory
by Jerry Salyer
INN Correspondent

Thu Nov 12, 5:33 PM ET
WASHINGTON, D.C.

In a plot-twist worthy of an Agatha Christie whodunnit, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars Richard Perle and David Frum believe they have finally unmasked the party responsible for America's troubles in Iraq.

The unusual suspect?

Private First Class Francis Guillory of the 255th Infantry Brigade, Louisiana National Guard.

At a press conference held in a Georgetown café this morning, the two neoconservative commentators outlined the case against Guillory – who is the privileged heir to several homemade rocking-chairs and a coon-dog named Virgil.

"Some folks are born with a silver spoon in hand," Frum said, commenting on Guillory's decadence. "Lord, but don't they help themselves?"

Yet the case against the 2nd-generation truck-driver turned global-policeman goes far beyond mere ad hominem attacks regarding his background.

"It's clear to everyone," observed Perle, "that the current Mideast quagmire has nothing whatsoever to do with AEI’s ideological tenets – i.e., Pax-Americana, New-World-Order, Creative-Destruction, Captain-Ahab-Had-The-Right-Idea, etc., etc...

Therefore we have to look for a scapego – er, other possible explanations."

Interjected Frum:

"And even a cursory look at Pfc Guillory's record reveals a troubling, dysfunctional pattern dating back to Day One."

A major mark against Guillory, Perle explained, is that the Guardsman has continually ignored AEI's finely-crafted "cakewalk" strategy.

"Many critics of the war make the sweeping claim that the cakewalk has proven ineffective in Iraq – but they're glossing over the fact that Guillory never actually cakewalked while in the field, not even once," Perle observed sharply.

"Like Trotskyism, our cakewalk policy is a great idea – that hasn't been tried."

And Guillory’s supposed "service" omits another, even more important matter: Success. He is part of a vast, multinational force that was given the mission of eliminating Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Yet embarrassingly Guillory has not only failed to end said program but has failed even to find it.

Additionally, the National Guardsman's progress in establishing secure, postmodern-style democracy in Iraq has fallen far short of the realistic goals he was assigned. Even today busts of Woodrow Wilson are depressingly few-and-far-between in Baghdad mosques.

Yet to date Guillory has shown no inclination to apologize to the American people.

"Really, it should come as no surprise to us that Private Guillory – a small-town working-class country boy – has the habit of evading responsibility," Frum reflected bitterly. "But from where I and my AEI Band-of-Brothers sit, that sort of cavalier attitude just doesn’t hold water."

Per Perle, however, the most damning indictment against Guillory is not his conduct of the war, but rather that the 1999 graduate of Hackleberry High let the war happen at all.

"If he cares so much about America, then where was Guillory's voice of conscience when people were foolishly equating the beleaguered and encircled Hussein regime to the mighty German Reich of the 1930's?" Perle wondered.

"And all that stupid 'Axis of Evil' crap that was flying around, I never saw any op-eds from him that protested all that jingoistic rubbish."

One reporter asked how Guillory's voice – or anybody else's – could have stopped the 2003 pro-war momentum, given that resistance to the invasion was shouted down by Republican partisan chants of "Smoking gun, mushroom cloud," and "You're lending aid and comfort to the terrorists."

She also alluded to the intense, consistent hostility being then-directed by AEI scholars against all opposed to the venture in Iraq.

Slightly exasperated, Perle shot back: "I hardly think this is the time to dig up musty, ancient history about who called whom a freedom-unworthy traitor a couple years ago... you freedom-unworthy traitor, you. Remember 9-11. Stop lending aid and comfort to the terrorists. Remember 9-11."

In any case, Guillory's culpability stretches beyond foreign policy, as Frum hastened to point out.

"Where was this guy when Katrina hit?" he demanded indignantly.

"Doing his job as a Louisiana Guardsman, protecting the lovely people of the state of Louisiana from disaster and anarchy? Oh, but nooo. He was sunning himself at taxpayers' expense, on a junket-vacation to Mesopotamia.

We've barely scratched the surface of his 'Persian Excursiongate', I'm afraid."

Perle struck a slightly conciliatory note as he supposed Guillory "just doesn't understand the pain people like him inflict on we of the long-suffering intellectual technocracy."

Frum grudgingly conceded this, but refused to let Guillory off so easily: "I mean, I know this guy's not a Yale & Harvard alum like me, but surely even an ignorant hick should be able to tell that winning hearts & minds is the whole essence of shock & awe? If only we'd killed more Iraqis at the very beginning, maybe they'd have learned to love us by now.

We spoon-fed Guillory, laid it out for him, step-by-step. Ricky and I announced as far back as 2004 in our book An End To Evil that we needed to put an end to evil, and overthrow the Iranian government as an encore to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

And yet two years and two tours in Iraq later, Guillory has not come even close to putting an end to evil – do you know how many muggings there were in Chicago last week?

And Guillory didn't follow my recommendation about seizing Iran and remaking it in the American image, either.

And now – wow, we need this like we need a hole in the head – for some freakish, inexplicably-lunatic reason, it seems that in recent years a number of countries around the world have grown increasingly interested in acquiring atomic weapons and deterrent capability. Thanks to Guillory's incompetence, vanity, and corruption, many countries no longer trust us to protect them from rogue nations."

One could almost hear the quotation marks as Frum concluded with characteristic sarcasm:

" 'Great' job, Private First Class Guillory, in helping prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons."

On patrol in the streets of Baghdad, Guillory has remained tight-lipped regarding the attacks on his reputation. Thus far his only reply to the political firestorm has been: "[expletive deleted]!! Git down, git down!! Take cover!!"

And it later turned out that even this terse comment did not so much address the threatening criticisms coming from Georgetown as it did a barrage of grateful smiles, cheering Iraqi children, and confetti being brought to bear on his squad's position.

The Imperial News Network
"Bringing the glorious light of progress to your pathetically-backward little corner of the Hegemony."

November 14, 2006

I can sleep better now.:D

[JLM]

Like Trotskyism, our cakewalk policy is a great idea – that hasn't been tried."

Paging Leo Strauss, paging Mr. Leo Strauss............... ;)

http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr071003.htm


Anyway, that's a good one Paul :D