Neo-confusion

Or maybe I should title this neo-crimes against humanity

Anyway, this is hilarious, or it would be if 650,000 people--give or take 100,000--hadn't died.

So now the neocons are trying to save their reputations by saying that Iraq was all Bush's fault, that he bungled the execution of a good idea and they had nothing to do with it. And now they are lying about it, some even insisting that they never supported the war.

The neocons are the ones who said it would be easy, that we wouldn't need that many men, that we'd be greeted as liberators, that the WMD did exist, etc., etc. And now that they have been proven wrong on every point, they are doing the only thing they know to do: lie and blame everyone but themselves.

"Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," [Richard Perle] said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding."

Iraq was never a good candidate for a democracy, and the real Mid-East experts knew it.

"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. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

So Richard Perle rallied for war, and then was surprised when . . . a war broke out.

What I want to know is what is their agenda. Are they just covering their ass by throwing Bush under a bus, or is it something more insidious?

The problem with these guys is that it is all a game to them, but it never was in the real world. This is about real lives, both American and Iraqi and countless other nationalities, and the blood is on their hands. That and the trillion plus dollars this war will cost us and our children.

War destroys countries, kills people and costs money, and that's the incompetence: to think that a major war won't kill people or that it doesn’t matter. It wasn't just that it was conducted poorly. Sure, not as many people had to die, but starting this kind of war and even doing it as competently as is possible is still going to kill many people.

The author states:

Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel?I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

This was never about democracy. It was about controlling Mid-East oil. In fact, democracy was never really a driving justification before the war, the justification initially was WMD and terrorism.

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."
Truly despicable. It wasn’t just failed execution; it was failed policy. Didn't Korea or Vietnam teach them anything? Aren't these people supposed to be "students of history" or something? They were just pushing a policy, their unilateral right to wage war for anything they consider the national interest, in this case oil, at any cost.

So these people want a do-over now? They're saying we made a mistake, but we should still keep our jobs and our reputations. Bullshit is what I say, but I'm sure two years from now they'll still be on The Today Show and Meet the Press. They'll just have moved on to Venezuela and Iran spouting the same tired lies.

I truly can't contain my hatred for these evil people, pushing our nation into a policy and a war that the public never wanted.


Hat tip: Think Progress