Neoconservative Leaders Reject Bush Administration’s War Policies

The Most Powerful People in the White House: The Women in Love with the President!!

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 is the President himself.

David Rose reports in the latest edition of Vanity Fair:

“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 was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of Bush’s long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.  Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder.

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….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.

Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think?  I expect to encounter disappointment.  What I find instead is despair and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration [that] 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….

Michael Ledeen, an American Enterprise Institute “freedom scholar,” has made these curiously critical remarks about George W. Bush: “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.”

Adapted by the Author from:
David Rose
Vanity Fair
November 3, 2006