Um. While I'd be happy to argue that we'd be better off if the days of the neocons were indeed numbered, I have to take issue with a few points in that article.
While neoconservatives aimed most of their prewar fire at Mr. Powell for persuading the president to take the case for war to the United Nations, now their target is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Unlike Mr. Rumsfeld, who might be called a realist conservative, the neoconservatives believe strongly in nation-building, and in particular in a version of nation-building that would make the world safer by making more of it like America.
The neocons have certainly had their knives out for Powell as long as I can remember, but calling Rumsfeld a "realist conservative" doesn't seem right. The "realist" label usually goes with Scrowcroft, maybe Kissinger, maybe some other 41 types, who were somewhat dubious about the Iraq venture from the start. Rumsfeld might not be up on broader neocon ideology, but he seems pretty whole-hog neocon on foreign policy, he was a charter PNAC person. Given how much water Rummy's carried for those people, it's pretty rich for them to be dumping on him.
As for the "nation building" line, I got the feeling there's some revisionism going on here. As near as I can tell, the real insider neocons (e.g. Wolfowitz and Perle ) were never really much into that, they just wanted to install Chalabi and move on to other things. Of course, there was so much handwaving in the official line on that stuff, it's hard to say what they really believed. I was amused by this recent line from Wolfowitz, though:
Testifying before the Senate on Tuesday on the $87 billion request, Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official who pushed so hard to own Iraq and control it, said, "We have no desire to own this problem or to control it." (that via Maureen Dowd in nytimes.com / #reply-19295175 )
Rumsfeld does not want to entertain the idea that Iraq might require more American troops. Such a prospect wouldn't square with his desire to "transform" the US military into a smaller force that would use technological superiority to win wars.
Neoconservatives had agreed that Iraq could be won with fewer troops than some military officers, such as former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, estimated would be necessary. But now in a postwar period that isn't going as they predicted, they insist more American troops should be dispatched - a prospect favored over the deployment of foreign troops, which would entail a watering down of America's control.
Writing this week in The Weekly Standard, a leading neoconservative publication, American Enterprise Institute analyst Tom Donnelly dubs Rumsfeld the "architect of defeat" for his refusal to increase troop levels in Iraq. "Now," he writes, "the kingdom may be lost for want of a nail."
This is again pretty rich. But Donelly will have to take it up with somebody a little better known as a neocon leading light.
"Our principal mistake, in my opinion, was that we didn't manage to work closely with the Iraqis before the war, so that there was an Iraqi opposition capable of taking charge immediately," he said.
"Today, the answer is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible," he added.
That would be the Prince of Darkness himself, from abcnews.go.com . Though Perle is willing to admit that "mistakes were made", he seems to be sticking to the Chalabi line, despite the rather obvious lack of evidence that Chalabi has any credibility on the ground in Iraq. Of course, lack of evidence in the conventional sense of the word was never much of a problem for the true believers. |
