OLEAN -- It has come to my attention that a conservative Texas blogger has called me a "buffoon" for writing a column about President Bush's troubles in Iraq, more specifically for referring to an "insurgency" and "suicide bombers." These last two subjects, he held, are grossly exaggerated by liberal mewling mainstream reporters.
Webster's defines a "buffoon" as someone who is always "clowning and trying to be funny," so I guess -- considering much of my life -- I have to plead guilty. But there's nothing funny about the situation in Iraq, and I would comment that somewhere in the Lone Star State, a village is looking for its idiot.
No insurgency? No suicide bombers? Turn on the TV!
Here's how bad it has gotten for President George W. Bush. His fellow neocons, his philosophical brothers in arms -- the very people who were the architects of this misadventure -- are now turning against the president, and not just for political reasons.
In "Neo Culpa," an article in the current "Vanity Fair" issue, David Rose puts together an astounding indictment of the Bush administration and Dubya himself from the very lips of those who previously praised him.
Richard Perle, David Frum, Ken Adelman, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Eliot Cohen, Danielle Pletka, Frank Gaffney -- not household names, granted, but all true neocon believers and politically influential gunpowder warriors who three years ago were molding the president's ideas and were hailing the president as a gutsy apostle of global truth, action and justice -- are now weighing in with some of the most acerbic criticism of the White House ever witnessed. Perle is the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century -- a Washington think tank (in this administration) that ceaselessly lobbied for Saddam Hussein's removal for at least a decade before Dubya engineered it. Perle is the main character in establishing "regime change" as the official White House policy and eventually was named chairman of the advisory board on Pentagon defense policy -- a little-covered but powerful position.
Perle was such a confident and effective under-the-radar hawk that his nickname at the Pentagon was "Prince of Darkness."
What does he have to say today? He terms Bush's execution of policy "disastrous" and notes to Rose that "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."
Does Perle regret his bellicosity? Seems to: "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."
Perle gave author Rose specific instances, previously unpublished, of our mishandling of the military goals and our betrayal of the combat troops in Iraq. One example: Some of the first members of the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority -- which blew early vital opportunities for peaceful solution -- were insistent on having ample ice for their drinks, so they trucked it in from Kuwait, 300 miles away, instead of flying in ice-making machines or storing it.
These convoys, related Perle to "Vanity Fair," "came under fire all the time. So we were sending American forces in harm's way, with full combat capability to support them, helicopters overhead, to move goddamn ice from Kuwait to Baghdad."
Sounds like material for a trial somewhere to me, but then, I'm just a buffoon.
David Frum is Dubya's former White House speechwriter, the wordsmith who actually penned the part of Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that will appear in the history books -- calling Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" -- and now views defeat in Iraq as pretty much a given 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."
Hey, Texas, notice Frum's easy and informed use of the word insurgency.
Frum, now at the famous neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute, is extremely critical of his former boss in the article and seems to think the fairly common view that the man is dumb may be right: "The big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas."
Veteran neocon Kenneth Adelman -- who actually served on the Defense Policy Board -- famously wrote a year before we invaded Iraq that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." He publicly praised Bush's national security team as the most competent since Harry Truman's.
Today, he tells "Vanity Fair," "They 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."
Adelman told the author, "The incompetence of the Bush team means that most everything we ever stood for now also lies in ruins."
Adelman thinks "the looting was the decisive moment. The moment this administration was lost was when Donald Rumsfeld took to the podium and said 'Stuff happens. This is what free people do.' It's not what free people do at all: it's what barbarians do."
The normally cheerful Adelman seemed so despondent in the interview that he predicted neoconservatism itself -- which he defined as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality ... using our power for moral good in the world" -- may be dead for at least a generation because of Iraq.
"The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," he told author Rose.
Eliot Cohen is another member of the Defense Policy Board -- and a professor in the prestigious School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University -- and half a decade ago another diligent and loud advocate of toppling Saddam.
"The thing I know now that I did not know then," he told David Rose, "is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this. I'm pretty grim. I think we're heading for a very dark world."
Frank Gaffney, once Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, now president of the invasion-backing Center for Security Policy, still believes it was a good idea, but indicated to writer Rose the well-meaning President Bush "has tolerated ... active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skullduggery that translates into subversion of his policies. ... 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."
That's not all. Gaffney predicts "the likelihood of military action against Iran is 100 percent."
There's much, much, much more. Go buy the magazine.
I wrote a few months ago that Iraq was not yet sufficiently similar to Vietnam to accurately compare the two. I now believe I was wrong. The evidence piles up daily. Not only do abound the schism, 20/20 hindsight and rash of fingerpointing like the examples above, but the same damn military mistakes are being repeated, despite Pentagon and White House avowals for decades that the lessons in 'Nam were hard-learned but lasting.
James Woolsey, former CIA director, pointed out to article author Rose that we are persistent in using military tactics in Iraq that were discredited in Vietnam -- such as being wedded to "search-and-destroy" missions instead of "clear-and-hold" tactics, for which you need the high troop levels Bush and now-fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were unwilling to supply. In other words, we keep ineffectively trying to hunt down insurgents instead of taking territory and defending it. Because he wanted to avoid criticism, Dubya tried to fight this war with too few men.
"There's never been a successful anti-insurgency campaign that operated according to search-and-destroy," Woolsey told reporter Rose, "because bad guys just come back in after you've passed through and kill the people that supported you." How the Bush administration "could have ignored the history of Vietnam is stunning to me," said Woolsey.
Notice the ex-CIA director's use of the word insurgency.
The American public -- as evidenced by the recent election -- is starting to catch on to all this. I still don't believe Americans are as confused about why we went into Iraq as they were about why we went into Vietnam -- which has never been adequately explained.
Kick that butcher Saddam Hussein out of power? Hey, good idea. Let's do it. And indeed, that part went well.
Rebuild Iraq and make it a democracy just like ours? Not so easy, probably impossible.
What Americans are starting to figure out is that George W. Bush and his minions didn't listen to the experts, the generals who accurately and loudly warned a half-assed public relations approach toward carrying this out with too few troops and without the support of allies would result in disaster.
The most vociferous generals were either fired or retired. Now, they also are bitter and are bad-mouthing the White House in books, memoirs and speeches.
So, Texas, look not to me for outstanding buffoonery. Look to Washington. Look to your guy in the White House.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 19 2006 |