Cakewalk Crowd Abandons Bush

[peejay 327]

Cakewalk Crowd Abandons Bush

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted Jan 05, 2007

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 antiwar 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.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18798

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Pat hits the nail on the head again.

The neocons are cutting and running -- not from their utterly bone-headed schemes, of course, but from the blame. They have this trait in common with Bush -- they can never admit they were wrong to begin with; if their stupid plan ends in a train wreck, it's always someone else's fault.

Now they're moving to the sidelines while the sh!t hits the fan, and concentrating on the future -- manuevering into a position to attach themselves to the next regime in Washington, so they can proceed with the master plan for "Securing the Realm."

Watch the rats deserting the sinking ship.... the same rats who steered it into the iceberg. Soon Bush will himself all alone, holding the bag.

Sadly, that's little consolation.

[Libersolis 0]

If you want to find out the true person/people to blame check out this insightful and wonderful book I just read.. I believe he hits the nail on the head and the present day conflict is indeed a result of mans preoccupation with believing in religions created thousands of years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

If you want to find out the true person/people to blame check out this insightful and wonderful book I just read.. I believe he hits the nail on the head and the present day conflict is indeed a result of mans preoccupation with believing in religions created thousands of years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion

Its only a delusion for someone like Dawkins who is the scientific equivalent of a Rush Limbaugh - his absolutist approach to religion is just another tedious example of the polarised discourses we already enjoy courteousy of network news.

[Libersolis 0]

If you had read the book you would know he isn't an absolutist. He simply believes within a high degree of probability that there is no god. My point in this is that these conflicts would be less likely to happen in the absence of religious belief.

[kaydee457 13]

If you want to find out the true person/people to blame check out this insightful and wonderful book I just read.. I believe he hits the nail on the head and the present day conflict is indeed a result of mans preoccupation with believing in religions created thousands of years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion

Its only a delusion for someone like Dawkins who is the scientific equivalent of a Rush Limbaugh - his absolutist approach to religion is just another tedious example of the polarised discourses we already enjoy courteousy of network news.

What, prey tell... do you know about "network news".....

Do you watch all network news channels regulary, or just one or two? Which ones do you watch to have formed such an opinion?

Inquiring minds want to know.....

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

If you want to find out the true person/people to blame check out this insightful and wonderful book I just read.. I believe he hits the nail on the head and the present day conflict is indeed a result of mans preoccupation with believing in religions created thousands of years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion

Its only a delusion for someone like Dawkins who is the scientific equivalent of a Rush Limbaugh - his absolutist approach to religion is just another tedious example of the polarised discourses we already enjoy courteousy of network news.

What, prey tell... do you know about "network news".....

Do you watch all network news channels regulary, or just one or two? Which ones do you watch to have formed such an opinion?

Inquiring minds want to know.....

I wouldn't class you as an inquiring mind Kaydee, quite the opposite in fact - since "life experience", however well self-advertised doesn't automatically translate into "wisdom"

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

If you had read the book you would know he isn't an absolutist. He simply believes within a high degree of probability that there is no god. My point in this is that these conflicts would be less likely to happen in the absence of religious belief.

Did you see the TV documentary he did for Channel 4? The Root of All Evil.

I agree with some of his opinions, but it's his divisive approach I don't much care for.