Neocons turn on Bush

[Marcus]

and finally face up to the facts.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

The article only contains excerpts from the full article that will come out in January. Some selections:

Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."

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 United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."


More at the link.

 

[fossten]

Posted at 4:26 PM

Nov. 04, 2006: Vanity Fair's Inventions
By David Frum
http://frum.nationalreview.com/

There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report. Headlined "Now They Tell Us," it purports to offer an "exclusive" access to "remorseful" former supporters of the Iraq war who will now "play the blame game" with "shocking frankness."

It cites not only myself as one of these remorseful supporters, but also Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, and others.

I can speak only for myself. Obviously I wish the war had gone better. It's true I fear that there is a real danger that the U.S. will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of U.S .policy.

I have made these points literally thousands of times since 2004, beginning in An End to Evil and most recently in my 22-part commentary on Bob Woodward's State of Denial (start here and find the remainder here.) I have argued them on radio and on television and on public lectern, usually in exactly the same words that are quoted in the press release.

"[T]he 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."

"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."

And finally that the errors in Iraq are explained by "failures at the center."

Nothing exclusive there, nothing shocking, and believe me, nothing remorseful.

My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous.

And that to my knowledge is the view of everybody quoted in the release and the piece: Adelman, Cohen, Ledeen, Perle, Pletka, Rubin, and all the others.

(Not that it matters, but this fight is very personal for many of those people. Cohen and Ledeen have both had children serve in Iraq, Cohen's in the Tenth Mountain Division, Ledeen's daughter in the civil administration and his elder son in the Marines. As a civilian adviser in Iraq, Rubin displayed impressive personal courage living solo for long periods of time in the Shiite zones of east Baghdad.)

Vanity Fair then set my words in its own context in its press release. They added words outside the quote marks to change the plain meaning of quotations.

When I talk in the third quotation above about failures "at the center," for example, I did not mean the president. If I had, I would have said so. At that point in the conversation, I was discussing the National Security Council, whose counter-productive interactions produced bad results.

And when I talked in the second quotation about "persuading the president," I was repeating this point, advanced here last month. In past administrations, the battle for the president's words was a battle for administration policy. But because Bush's National Security Council malfunctioned so badly, the president could say things without action following - because the mechanism for enforcing his words upon the bureaucracy had broken.

In short, Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over "how to correct course and win the war" to advance obsessions all their own.

How was this done?

The author of the piece touted by the press release is David Rose, a British journalist well known as a critic of the Saddam Hussein regime and supporter of the Iraq war. (See here and here for just two instances out of a lengthy bibliography.)

Rose has earned a reputation as a truth teller. The same unfortunately cannot be said for the editors and publicists at Vanity Fair. They have repackaged truths that a war-fighting country needs to hear into lies intended to achieve a shabby partisan purpose.

I think the credibility of Vanity Fair in publishing an article that twists the facts right before an election has been undermined.

 

[JohnnyBz00LS]

Not so fast, it's not just VF publishing these accounts and opinions of your hero Rummy..........

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Nov04/0,4670,USIraqCritics,00.html

Iraq War Proponents Decry Administration
Saturday, November 04, 2006

By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON — A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster.

Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

"I probably would have said,'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'"he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue.

Meanwhile, the Military Times Media Group, a Gannett Co. subsidiary that publishes Army Times and other military-oriented periodicals, said Friday it was calling for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. An editorial due to be published Monday says active-duty military leaders are beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning and execution and dimming prospects for success. It declares that"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large."

The editorial concludes by saying that regardless of which party wins in next week's election, the time has come"to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go."

When asked about the Vanity Fair article and Perle's criticism, White Housespokesman Gordon Johndroe said,"We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."

Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration's conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised President Bush. Adelman said he was"crushed"by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The critiques in Vanity Fair come as growing numbers of Republicans have criticized Bush's policies on Iraq. The war, unpopular with many Americans, has become a top-tier issue in next week's congressional elections.

Perle said"you have to hold the president responsible"because he didn't recognize"disloyalty"by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a"cakewalk."But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security .

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era,"he said."Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Am I left to presume fossten thinks Rumsfeld is "doing a heck of a job" too??

 

[fossten]

Not so fast, it's not just VF publishing these accounts and opinions of your hero Rummy..........

blah blah blah...

Meanwhile, the Military Times Media Group, a Gannett Co. subsidiary that publishes Army Times and other military-oriented periodicals [AND USA TODAY AND SEVERAL OTHER LIBERAL NEWSPAPERS] , said Friday it was calling for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. An editorial due to be published Monday says active-duty military leaders are beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning and execution and dimming prospects for success. It declares that"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large."

BLAH BLAH BLAH...

Am I left to presume fossten thinks Rumsfeld is "doing a heck of a job" too??

Hey, troll, we don't need a recap of what TommyB posted.

As far as Rumsfeld goes, you moonbats aren't even worthy to draw his bathwater. He's probably the best SecDef we've ever had. Not that you'd be interested in the reasons I have for saying that, but I could drop a whole pile of facts on you that would back up my opinion.

Pentagon Rebuts Editorial In 'Military Newspapers' Calling For Rumsfeld Resignation

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on November 4, 2006 - 22:13.

The MSM has had a field day trumpeting an impending editorial in "military newspapers" calling for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation. But as NewsBusters John Stephenson and Michael Bates have documented here and here, here's what the liberal media didn't disclose:


Despite the official-sounding ring of "military newspapers," these are commercial, private-sector operations owned by Gannett, the chain whose leading outlet is the left-leaning USA Today. The editorial is roughly as representative of the official military view of the Secretary as an anti-Rumsfeld rant by the New York Times.

While the MSM tried to multiply the significance of the editorial by mentioning that it was carried in four separate papers, representing the various branches of the military, again they are all just fellow members of the Gannett stable. It's as misleading as claiming that an article published in the various regional editions of TV Guide appeared in "hundreds of magazines."

Now the Pentagon has weighed in. Staying above the fray as to just what those "military newspapers" are - and are not - the DoD has offered a systematic rebuttal of the various allegations contained in the editorial. Highlights:

Editorial Claim: Secretary Rumsfeld has been presenting "rosy scenarios" on the situation in Iraq.

Pentagon Response: The DoD denies it and challenges those who have so claimed to cite chapter and verse.

Editorial Claim: “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.”

Pentagon Response: "Defense Secretaries in times of war are always subject to sometimes harsh criticism. The Secretary has helped oversee two conflicts while also transforming a mammoth bureaucracy, overseeing sweeping humanitarian missions across the globe, and helping to protect the American people at home."

Editorial Claim: “Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war’s planning, execution and dimming prospects for success. Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: ‘I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.’”

Pentagon Response: "Not only have military commanders involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom continually expressed their belief in the importance of the mission in Iraq," says the Pentagon, but General Abizaid’s quote was used selectively and omitted this part of his statement:

“This is a hard thing. And it’s going to take a long time. And it’s going to take a lot of courage and a lot of perseverance and unfortunately more blood, and it’s going to take more treasure. But there are more people in Iraq that are working with us to try to make their country a better place than are trying to tear it apart. . . .The people that are trying to tear it apart are ruthless. They are pulling out everything that they can to make it fail. . . .And it’s hard. That’s why we kept extra forces there. And it’s hard and it’s tough and it’s difficult, but we will prevail. . . But I can tell you, people have a right to express their opinion. There’s political activity. There’s freedom of the press. There are things that are happening in Iraq that don’t happen anywhere else in the Middle East. And we ought to be proud of it.”

Editorial Claim: “Last week, someone leaked to the New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on ‘critical’ and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year.”

Pentagon response: "It is foolish to try to draw conclusions from one piece of classified information leaked to the New York Times. What that page referred to was a snapshot in time. Military and civilian leaders have repeatedly said Iraq is facing difficult challenges, and that as long as the enemy is determined to thwart a free and democratic Iraq the stability throughout the country will fluctuate. The security situation, however, is not monolithic across the country. Many parts of Iraq are relatively peaceful."


*owned*