Vanity Fair has published an extraordinary article [1] including interviews with many architects of America’s foreign policy. What do they think now that Iraq has been such a miserable failure?
Varying degrees of regret can be detected in the people interviewed, but little remose, except from Kenneth Adelman:
Fearing that worse is still to come, [Kenneth] 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.”
That constant din in the background of most of the other interviews is blame directed toward the President for poorly executing the what the neocon architects still consider policy. Reading between the lines, you know that they’d like another crack at it if they can ever come to power again. Here are a few excerpts:
If not for the administration’s incompetence, [neocons] say, Saddam’s tyranny could have been replaced with something not only better but also secure. “Huge mistakes were made,” Richard Perle says, “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.”
Here is an excerpt from the interview of Frank Gaffney, president of the hawkish Center for Security Policy, which has close ties with the upper echelons of the Pentagon.
Gaffney describes the administration as “riven,” arguing that “the drift, the incoherence, the mixed signals, the failure to plan this thing [Iraq] rigorously were the end product of that internal dynamic.” His greatest disappointment has been the lack of resolution displayed by Bush himself: “This president has tolerated, and the people around him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skulduggery 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,” Gaffney says. “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.”
It is currently standard GOP policy to paint the Iraq war as a good idea that was poorly executed by an incompetent president. [2] An aggressive media would remind the GOP that few Republicans were speaking out against Bush’s Iraq policy itself when Saddam’s statue toppled or when Bagdad was looted non-stop. They now want to have it both ways, by casting strategic blame despite their earlier silence at critical junctures.
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