Hullabaloo

Monday, November 20, 2006

 
Sweet Neocons

by digby

Watching all these neocon rats racing to fling themselves off the sinking Republican ship is an amazing sight to see. On Blitzer's show yesterday they were all over the place, blaming everyone but themselves for the disaster in Iraq.

Ken Adelman is heartbroken to find that the administration is dysfunctional and incompetent. David Frum just wishes the president had followed through on the words David Frum had put in his mouth. Michael Rubin throws Condi under the bus and then backs up over her:

ADELMAN: Well, I think, when you look at the record, Wolf, it's a record that has a lot of mistakes. You can't read a book without, you know, realizing that.

George Packer's book, "The Assassin's Gate," Michael Gordon and Bernie Trainor's book on "Cobra II," Bob Woodward's book on "State of Denial," Tom Ricks's book, "Fiasco" -- they all have different episodes but the same sad, story.

And you have to ask yourself, how did this happen? And all them attempt, and all of them are serious works and all of them full of facts and figures and episodes. And to tell you the truth, it just breaks your heart.

BLITZER: Does it break your heart, David Frum, to see how this situation unfolded?

Because in the Vanity Fair quotes that were released -- the whole article has not yet been published, but in the quotes -- I'll read one of them from you, and you'll tell me if this is accurate: "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 idea 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.

FRUM: Yes, that is an accurate quote.

BLITZER: It is accurate?

FRUM: Yes. And it reflects a lot of what I've been saying for the past year and a half.

When the president gives these speeches, every speech is the result of a battle for the president's heart and mind, as has famously been said about the speech-making process.

So different people try to persuade the president to say different kinds of things. And he considers and deliberates. And George Bush committed himself to a series of propositions.

One, he was going to stop Iran and North Korea from acquiring these terrible weapons. And two, that in Iraq, he was going to put his trust in the future of Iraq in a democratic process.

Instead, what happened in Iraq, for example, was the United States became an occupying power almost immediately.

That even before the invasion of Iraq, the decision was made not to have any kind of an Iraqi face on the future government, on the next government of Iraq, because...

BLITZER: Was that Paul Bremer who made that decision, who was the provisional authority representative, the proconsul, as some people say he was? Or was that a decision made by Rumsfeld or Cheney?

FRUM: Paul Bremer was the result of it. But the reason there was a proconsul was because a decision was made not to have an Iraqi provisional government. And that came about because the administration fought itself to a standstill. I mean, there were people who -- there were a number of Iraqis, each of whom had patrons in the administration.

BLITZER: A lot of people would say, that was, Michael Rubin, a huge blunder. You were there. You worked for Paul Bremer. Who came up with that idea of a U.S. military occupation as opposed to trying to let the Iraqis take charge?

RUBIN: Well, I'd second what David said, that that decision, Paul Bremer was the result of that decision. What there was was a debate within the administration about, you have the Iraqi opposition. You had, I believe it was seven key figures. And the question was whether to allow them to become a provisional government. They had already been self-selected through a number of conferences. Or whether there would be some sort of American presence first.

The real debate in Washington was whether we would have more influence before liberation or after liberation. And ultimately, it was the National Security Council, the national security adviser which made the decision to go with an American occupation presence.

BLITZER: That was Condoleezza Rice?

RUBIN: That was Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley.

BLITZER: The deputy national security adviser...

RUBIN: At the time, yes.

BLITZER: ... who's now the national security adviser. And Condoleezza Rice, of course, is the secretary of state now.

RUBIN: That was the compromise that came out of interagency debate, when again, as David said, the State Department, the Pentagon and the others fought themselves to a standstill.

BLITZER: And you think that was a blunder?

RUBIN: I do believe it is one the greatest blunders we have made. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Paul Bremer did a lot of good, but nothing they accomplished which was good couldn't have been accomplished without an immediate transfer of sovereignty. And the fact that we labelled ourselves an occupying power, unlike in Bosnia, unlike in Kosovo and elsewhere, really put -- it justified all the insurgent rhetoric against us. And it turned our allies from those creating a democracy into collaborators.

Frum and Rubin are both saying that they never backed an occupation but rather instead wanted to put "an iraqi" in charge of the country from the get. Apparently temporary viceroy Bremer was the compromise. Tim at Balloon Juice, seeing Richard Perle's similar explanation in yesterdays WaPo, and concludes:

Arguing about Iraq often gets stuck on what exactly our original exit strategy was supposed to be. Rumsfeld clearly planned to get in and out rapidly, which can only mean that we intended to knock over the top tier of leadership and hand over the country to somebody. Who, exactly, is often the sticking point.

The top candidate was always Ahmad Chalabi. A serial fabricator, forger, convicted embezzler and the charismatic leader of a ragtag group of Iraqi exiles Chalabi clearly owned the hearts and minds of neoconservatives. Now that we know the rest of his story (no support inside Iraq, a likely double agent for Iran) the appeal to incredulity fallacy seems so tempting that even I want to write it off on the grounds of a basic faith in humanity. Nobody can be that dumb, etc. Sadly one cannot deny that the Chalabi handover makes more sense than any other explanation for the Pentagon’s prewar behavior. Handing Iraq over to one of Saddam’s liutenants seems improbable in light of the dewy-eyed humanitarianism displayed by early war supporters. Saddam had killed off homegrown opposition leaders and Ali al-Sistani wasn’t offered the job (too close to Iran). It would be Chalabi, or…who?

I have no problem saying they would have been that dumb. The neocons for all their brilliance have serious and fatal blindspots and one of them is a terrible, immature romanticicm. I can't say whether the pentagon really went in with a light force because they were planning to do a quick handover to Chalabi (although it makes as much sense as anything else --- and they did pay him more than $30 million.) I do know, however, that the starry eyed neocons believed that Chalabi was going to be the George Washington of Iraq. (It's hard to believe now that they could be this absurdly naive, but they were.)

Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq...” After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”

So maybe Rummy and Dick truly agreed with Perle and company that they could roll into Iraq, topple Saddam and quickly turn it over to their pal Ahmad and then build some nice, permanent air-conditioned bases in the middle of the desert. Within a year or so it would be just like Germany, only hotter and without the good beer.

From what Rubin says, Condi and Hadley were whispering in Junior's other ear telling him that Chalabi was a bad choice. And Junior, being the braintrust he is, decided to split the difference and go in with Rummy and Dick's light force but do Condi's occupation --- without any planning, of course, just the knowledge that his "gut" told him it was the right thing to do. (Oy --- why didn't they just consult Nancy Reagan's astrologer?)

It's possible. Sometimes it keeps me awake nights wondering what it would have been like to have a real president when all this came down --- you know, one who had enough brains to sift all this advice in a coherent fashion and who had the experience and maturity to actually lead instead of flip a coin or read the pattern in the bottom of his morning frosted flakes for signs of what to do. If this doesn't prove that it really does matter who's in charge, I don't know what will. This conservative committee of "grown-ups" fucked things up royally.

Meanwhile, just becaue the neocons are running for the exits doesn't mean they don't continue to be wrong about everything. It is their most distinguishing characteristic. Right now, however, their brand is very damaged so they are beginning to distance themselves from their "movement" in a most clumsy and amusing fashion:

BLITZER: Ken, I'll start with you. The Iraq Study Group...I see ten very influential, prominent guys, but I don't see one conservative, neoconservative, Ken Adelman. What do you make of that?

ADELMAN: Nothing, to tell you the truth. I'm not a neoconservative. I was always a conservative. While the neoconservatives, I guess, were Trotskyites in campaigning in some nefarious manner in 1964, I was campaigning for Barry Goldwater. So I think it doesn't matter all that much. It's an academic exercise. Because I am conservative and all that. But I think it's a very good group, and I'm interested in what they have to say.

BLITZER: Are you concerned, though, about the membership of this Iraq study group, David Frum, given their histories, the so-called realist as opposed to the neoconservative, the idealist school of thought?

FRUM: I think it is -- I'm with Ken. I'm not sure how helpful any of those terms are.

It's certainly not helpful to David Frum and the rest of the neocons, is it?

But they aren't going anywhere, not really. They are always wrong but they always find ways to rationalize their dizzy incompetence. And they truly do represent the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, such as it is. Without them, the Republican party would no longer have a foreign policy. Poppy and Jim Baker aren't going to last much longer and Pat Buchanan is going to be tied up down at the border taking potshots at "Jose" for the forseeable future.

So, this is what we are going to be dealing with in right wing foreign policy from now on. Here's Rubin again, spelling it all out:

BLITZER: To bring in the regional powers, including Iran and Syria and to start a dialogue. The Iraq study group of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, they're already doing what Bush administration refuses to do. They've been meeting with high-ranking Iranian and Syrian officials.

RUBIN: Actually, the Bush administration doesn't refuse to do it. On May 31st, Condoleezza Rice offered to have direct talks with Iran in the context...

BLITZER: But they laid out certain conditions?

RUBIN: The only condition was that Iran suspend uranium enrichment during the duration of the talks.

BLITZER: But Baker-Hamilton didn't ask for that suspension.

RUBIN: But you know what? Four days later, Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, got up in response to Condoleezza Rice's offer and said, why don't you just admit that you've lost? Why don't you just admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?

That was Iran's response.

Yes. It was quite the zinger, wasn't it? Let's nuke 'em back into the stone age.

Rubin and friends think that insults and bluster are real and that great nations should react in anger when some bombastic fool says something stupid. (But then, they always thought we should invade the Soviet Union because they were rude to the US too. Somebody forgot to tell them about the sticks and stones thing when they were kids.)

In this sense they've got an awful lot in common with al Qaeda --- they both have an outsized sense of "pride" which is really insecurity. It's not a good idea for the world's most powerful nation to react to a street corner diss. We should set the agenda, not some blowhard who is trying to impress his followers.

It is a cosmic joke that we had a terrible combination of vain, hubristic neocons and a brand name in an empty flightsuit in charge when militant Islamic fundamentalism made its big play. These guys always lose their heads when somebody taunts them and they overreact. There's a lesson in that somewhere.


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digby 11/20/2006 01:02:00 PM |