Vanity Fair writer David Rose interviewed Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and others and guess who they think will make the perfect fall guy. Read their candid comments on where the blame lies for
Hate to say I told you so George, but…..
Originally posted July 10, 2006.
The writing on the wall that is.
So many improprieties, so many deaths, so many failures, so many hard questions being asked.
Someone's going to have to take the fall for the corporate master, George.
Someone......
* whose popularity is already in the tank.
* without the ablility to articulate a plausible public defense.
* whose demise would be the perfect three ring diversion for a nation paying far too much attention to the state of their "democracy" these days.
* who understands there is no code of honor among theives.
* who has graciously implicated himself as "The Decider".
* who is entirely expendable.
In other words George, someone who has become too much of a liability to the master who created him.
Someone like you.
Perhaps you're thinking "they won't turn on me".
You say you are a man of God, then maybe you have heard that part about reaping what you sow.
When they toss you to the lions and or Democrats, you could just come clean and at least that would be something we could work with.
I don’t know George, it may even be too late for that now. You know how it is when you cry wolf too often. No one hears you anymore.
Now They Tell Us
David Rose
Neo Culpa
As
Richard Perle
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "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 for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
David Frum
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.
"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."
Kenneth Adelman
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."
"The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of
"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
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar:
"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."
Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy:
"[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. 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."
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer:
"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."
Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board:
"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
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Ouch.
Maybe so.