Cakewalk Crowd Abandons Bush

Cakewalk Crowd Abandons Bush
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke.

For as he prepares to "surge" 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we "are not winning," his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations.

Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bu****es mismanaged the war that they, the "Vulcans," so brilliantly conceived.

Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9/11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bu****e incompetence that fouled it up.

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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53637

Not to be deterred by the fact that as a neophyte in world affairs he was steered so wrongly by the neoconservatives on Iraq, Mr. Bush continues to listen to them. He is dutifully "doubling down" (surge and accelerate) as ordered to by the editorial staff of the Weekly Standard:

Neocons' hand seen in 'the surge'
They push plan to boost troops in Iraq

By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times
January 04. 2007 8:00AM

Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war's intellectual architects - the so-called neoconservatives - have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.

Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Defense Department's most senior neocon, was shipped off to the World Bank. His Pentagon colleague Douglas Feith departed for academia. John Bolton left the State Department for the United Nations.

But other neocons have moved back into the mainstream of steering Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week - a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort - has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This group - which includes William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute - was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago. In these neoconservatives' view, not enough troops were being set aside to stabilize the country. They also worried that the Pentagon had formulated a plan that concentrated too heavily on killing insurgents rather than securing law and order for Iraqi citizens.

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http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070104/REPOSITORY/701040393/1013/48HOURS

Consistent with the predictable neoconservative line that this is "all Bush and Rummy's fault, not ours," note the spin in the article that the neocons "warned the Bush administration along time ago that the plan was insufficient."

This is a transparent effort to spin and re-write history in order to salvage the neoconservative reputation. It's a pack of lies.

I followed this story closely ever since 2002. The neocons had nothing to say prior to entering Iraq other than "this will be a cakewalk!" Invade NOW!

They did not start commenting on the incompetence of the execution of the war until it became clear that things were going horribly wrong and that quagmire was setting in. The horses were already out of the barn when these "intellectuals" tried to close the barn. Now they are attempting to salvage their own credibility.

In the river of ink that flowed from neoconservative pens in 2001-2002 demanding an attack on Iraq there was no more than a trickle that ever was devoted to any specifics of how the plan should be carried out.

They just wanted to get it started, that's all. They were quite shrewd and smart enough to know that once committed, no matter how the operation went, we were stuck. This is fine with them because they want American troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future to suit their own grand schemes.