Just yesterday I was stunned to read Ralph Peters give up on Iraq. Ralph Peters, a former US army officer and regular contributor to the New York Post and Fox News, has been one of the strongest advocates for the war in Iraq all along. But he was, after all, just a pundit. More along the lines of a Citizen Smash than anything else: a center-right hawkish independent who believed deeply in the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq war, but wasn’t willing to carry water for Bush just for the sake of supporting the GOP.
But today, a few more voices emerged in opposition to the war. Unlike Peters, these men were central players in the construction of Bush’s war policy, and were important architects of Bush’s neoconservative policy overall. Most famous is Richard Perle, of the old Defense Policy Board, and open advocate for ad hoc coalitions and aggressive democracy promotion through war. He was also the point man for bringing Ahmad Chalabi into negotations with the White House. Perle was a hawk’s hawk in the 1980s – a critic of Reagan’s talks with Gorbachev – and a fierce neoconservative voice within an already neoconservative Pentagon. Today, however, Richard Perle is giving up too. This article also cites the author of the “Axis of Evil” speech, David Frum, who surrenders on Iraq as well. And then there is the man who infamously claimed that the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk.” That would be Ken Adelman, who believes neoconservatism is itself dead as a result of Iraq.
‘[T]he 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.’
What’s interesting is that all three of these architects of neoconservatism and the Iraq policy are placing blame on the same place: George W. Bush and his Administration. The architects blame incompetence, arrogance, inflexibility, corruption, and stupidity. As 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.”
Frum, the speechwriter, amazingly suggests that Bush’s problem was that he could let the words Frum wrote resonate in his brain enough to stick.
“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 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.”
Others add to the mix as well. Consider Eliot Cohen, another key Defense Policy Board official,
“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.”
And finally, Michael Rubin, a Coalition Provisional Authority Staffer and top Pentagon aid, who shows just how tragic this is for Iraqi reformers themselves.
“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.”
Alas, we have a circular firing squad. The intellectual architects and rhetoricians behind the Bush Doctrine, the War on Terror, and the Iraq invasion have essentially given up. And they blame the performance of Bush and Rumsfeld for the failures of the policy. I would argue that the concept was deeply flawed, not just the execution. I can’t help but notice the refusal of these men to take responsibility for the failures in Iraq. It’s always somebody else’s fault. I’m certain we’ll have the great argument over whether or not the policy was attainable at all in the next few years. But for now, the exodus of the war’s theoriticians and planners stands in as the greatest argument for the Administration’s failure on national security.