In the early days of the Bush administration, neoconservatives Ken
Adelman, Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, and
James Woolsey eagerly advocated a more assertive and expansive American
foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. All of them suggested
that the United States should no longer rely on the United Nations
but unilaterally eliminate the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran. Soon the president bought this neoconservative
proposition hook, line, and sinker.
Urged on by close and like-minded advisers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, the President confidently ordered
the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. There was joy throughout the
neoconservatives’ camp. As they saw it, “the New American
Century” was dawning. Six weeks later, a jubilant George W. Bush
landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and proudly announced
that the US has prevailed in the Battle of Iraq.
That was four years ago. In the meantime, the war to make Iraq into
a shining example of democracy turned into a civil war with no end
in sight. How do the President’s neoconservative friends today
view the war they urged upon him?
It was Ken Adelman, one of the neoconservative members of the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board, who had predicted in the Washington Post “that
liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.” Now he claims that Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice “turned out to be among the most incompetent
teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually,
have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly dysfunctional.”
David Frum and Richard Perle had reinforced the President’s bravado with
their New York Times bestseller, “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on
Terror.” Now Perle calls Mr. Bush’s Iraq adventure a “disaster” and
feels sorry for him: “I don’t think he realizes the extent of the
opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.”
Former White House speech writer David Frum, who invented the phrase “axis-of-evil,” feels
that the President did not fully absorb the neoconservative ideas: “And
that is the root of maybe everything.”
Frank Gaffney, founder of the far-right Center for Security Policy, is particularly
harsh on Mr. Bush: “This president has tolerated, and the people around
him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skullduggery
that translates into subversion of his policies. … He
doesn’t in fact seem to be a man of principle who’s steadfastly pursuing
what he thinks is the right course.”
Ex-CIA director James Woolsey pushed particularly hard for the war on Iraq in
newspapers and on national television. Now, however, he is “aghast at what
he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so
painfully 40 years ago” in Vietnam.
And then there is Eliot Cohen, professor at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, “the most influential neocon in academe," admitting
that he made the mistake of not knowing “how incredibly incompetent” the
Bush team would be. Already in 2005
he ridiculed the administration’s "cockamamie schemes" in creating
the
Iraq army and the "under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects
mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority." When Condoleezza Rice was named
secretary of state, Cohen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, criticized the
administration's foreign policy for its "sheer stubbornness, culpable tactlessness
and, more dangerously, a lack of realism."
Nevertheless, Secretary Rice seems so impressed by Cohen’s views that recently
she surprised everybody by appointing him Counselor, a key position in the State
Department. Apparently, the administration’s infatuation with the neoconservative
call for American control of the Middle East remains alive.
The hawks are angry, not about the dubious advice they gave the commander-in-chief,
but about his apparent failure to deliver the victory they predicted.