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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
It's every ideologue for himself as even the most hardcore Republicans try to distance themselves from the disaster in Iraq.
Aug 30, 2004 | The Grand Old Party's "big tent" on foreign policy is flapping in tatters. Behind the Republicans' predictable show of Rambo bravado as they gather in Madison Square Garden Monday, they are reeling. The libertarians and isolationists have left in disgust. The respectable traditional internationalists of the James Baker-Brent Scowcroft school are holding their noses and saying nothing, but behind closed doors they are seething. President Bush and his fundamentalist evangelicals have left only the neoconservatives who plunged them into the nightmarish swamps of Iraq. And now even that notoriously disciplined group has gone rogue and is rioting wildly: The neocons have turned upon one another -- and on Bush himself.
The neoconservatives who dominate the civilian echelon in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council understandably remain silent. With their every prediction and assurance about Iraq discredited, there is little more they can do but hope for another war, this time with Iran, that will miraculously sweep away all their problems. It is like betting the second mortgage on red when you have already lost your shirt and the roulette wheel is rigged to turn up black.
Senior neocon administration officials like Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah at Vice President Cheney's right hand; Harold Rhode, the Islamic affairs advisor to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and the Pentagon coteries led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith are lying low in public, as well they might.
They would prefer that their longtime favorite, Ahmed Chalabi, the veteran head of the Iraqi National Congress who is now under indictment in Iraq for various crimes, were forgotten by the usually compliant mainstream media. But it is their own sympathizers and fellow conspirators on behalf of Chalabi in the media, led by the likes of Washington Post columnist James Hoagland and neocons Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin in National Review Online, who will not let Chalabi's embarrassments die.
On Aug. 19, Rubin, formerly a midlevel advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and now at the American Enterprise Institute, blasted Bush, noting that the president cannot escape the tainted legacy of his father. "There is little goodwill left in Iraq," he opined. "The United States government has managed to squander it. Bush may be sincere about his desire for democracy, but to Iraqis, family matters. Iraqis associate the president with his father, who is notorious among Iraqi Shia for his failure to support their March 1991 uprising."
Rubin went on to attack administration policy as incompetent. "The recent siege of Najaf reinforces the Shia belief that the U.S. government is anti-Shia. In recent days, I've spoken to a number of Iraqis from Najaf, Samawa, and Diwaniya. They are disgusted."
Bush's right hand in foreign policy, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who sided with the neocons against Secretary of State Colin Powell on almost every major Middle East issue, doesn't get any kinder treatment. On the contrary, Rubin lays the Iraq debacle firmly at her door. "In October 2003, the White House launched a major reorganization of its Iraq-policy team ... Rice became titular head of the Iraq Stabilization Group, but her deputy (and former mentor) Robert Blackwill, who is well known for his slash-and-burn management style, became chief for political transition. His influence on Iraq policy was quickly felt in both Baghdad and in Washington."
Chalabi's disinformation shaped the decision and planning to invade Iraq, including the assumption that Iraqi masses would embrace their American liberators in gratitude indefinitely. Today, these masses are openly calling for U.S. forces to be swept out of the country, and no one in the administration dares to say a word in defense of Chalabi. Yet Chalabi's hardcore defenders are still at it, slandering the U.S. intelligence community in defense of the convicted bank embezzler.
But as the death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq relentlessly climbs toward 1,000, the leading intellectual neoconservatives outside the administration have turned to feud viciously among themselves.
