The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.
Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”
Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.
It’s lonely at the top when you screw everything up.
I still can’t figure out what euphoric moment of toasting that people have where war is concerned, I mean really, these people in the 21st century are a bunch of Neanderthals.
I’m bumping this to the top Boo. Didn’t realize we had posted so close together (timewise).
I wonder if the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down ..
For a moment there I felt like an alcohol soaked coke fried power junkie being slapped awake. It’s just not a good thing.
It’s important not to let stuff like this distract from the fundamental Iraq realities. It’s tempting to celebrate the too-little, too-late conversion of asswipes like Adelman because they lend more weight to the resistance to Bush’s war. Stories like this offer hope that the US might be returning to some semblance of sanity.
But the late-conversion syndrome shifts focus from what was really wrong with the Iraq invasion and occupation: that it ever happened in the first place, with the enthusiastic backing of Adelman-style fools. The problem is not that the war was badly handled — which it was– but that it was doomed from the first time the idea was floated to a traumatized public. There was never the possiblility of “victory”. There was only either chaos and civil war or open-ended US imperialist occupation and bloody resistance without end. Period. The inevitablility of disater was not hard to forsee unless, like Adelman and the rest of the neocons, you were blinded by childish ideology and religious delusion.
Yeah, the president IS ultimately responsible. So is Adelman and his circle of arrogant fools. They deserve the same fate as Bush and Cheney, and their late-coming asscovering should have no mitigating effect.
What I have never been able to understand is what were the Bush supporters thinking they we getting when they elected this guy? Daddy bailed him out of every major endeavor he tried and failed at in his life. He sat out Nam in Alabama (or maybe not), was involved with substances into his 40’s, and was a C student at Yale where nobody is a C student. This was a resume of a Presidential candidate?? Like I said, I will never understand their thinking.
compassionate conservative thing going on. During the debates he did that wanting to be like Christ thing that I didn’t buy but must admit was very “charming” and somehow led to a mass belief that he was a nice guy. And then there is the pedigree, all placed beside Al Gore’s inability to make everyone forget about blowjobs and sex addiction.
Daddy bailed him out of every major endeavor he tried and failed at in his life.
I have been thinking lately about how smart it was that of Bush Senior did not pursue the defeated Iraqi Army into Iraq after the Kuwait invasion. We all now know what would have happened if Bush Senior had toppled Saddam back then, but did Bush senior know the potential and thus stopped the advance, or did he just get lucky?
Supporting the “he got lucky defense” is the fact that Bush Senior seemed to let Bush II go into Iraq at all to overthrow Saddam, but I guess we really do not know whether junior was advised not to and did not listen, or whether Bush senior again indeed just got lucky. I sure wish I know what advice Bush Senior gave to Junior as Junior contemplated this miserable failure of a foreign policy!
I really need some help here.
Could someone with a strong stomach please read this op ed from today’s LAT and tell me this is a joke. I tried, but I really started feeling sick and had to quit.
“Bomb Iran: Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-muravchik19nov19,0,1681154.story?coll=la-opinion-center
This guy can’t be serious, right?
I started to write a comment, but it grew too long, so removed it from this thread and posted it as a diary.
Thanks for creating a diary! Please post a link as I can’t find it. I would like to recommend!
I forgot to post the damn thing. It’s up now.
The neo-cons have had a taste of power. They want it again. They are distancing themselves from Bush so that they can regroup behind a new candidate for ’08. Remember how “the politicians lost Viet Nam?” That was a useful argument because you could insert almost any politician’s name in the quote and run against him. The neo-con’s are trying to claim that the early stages of the war, the “good part”, were their doing. Rumsfeld and, ultimately, Bush were responsible for the “bad parts” because they did not listen to the neo-cons. See? The politicians lost Iraq , too?
Perhaps this is simplistic, but I think that’s what’s going on here.
Iraq. What a freakin’ mess.
I have a question that came to me recently. Has there ever been a three-way civil war before? Like this one with Shia/Sunni/Kurds?