When the going gets tough, what do the tough do? Blame somebody else. There is something deeply disturbing about the inability of anybody in power to take responsibility for their mistakes. Over at Vanity Fair, many of the neoconservative architects behind the Iraq War - the same naive folks who declared it would be a "cake-walk" - now blame the failure of the war on Bush's incompetence. While I certainly don't want to defend Bush's competence, I sincerely doubt that the current miasma we find ourselves in is simply a result of poor follow through. Rather, I think the plan itself - the utopian notion that we could engineer democracy via pre-emptive action - was really to blame. Until neo-conservatives accept the error of their own ideas (and it's hard to think of a more resounding falsification than the Iraq war), they don't stand a chance of fixing them.
That said, it certainly is fun watching the conservatives cannibalize each other. My favorite quote comes from David Frum, former Bush speechwriter and author of "The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House":
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.
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What does this have to do with Cannabis?
Unbelievable - it took Frum how long to realize that language is just a means to an end with these people?
Rather, I think the plan itself - the utopian notion that we could engineer democracy via pre-emptive action - was really to blame.
Many people find it counter-intuitive, but most of the original neo-conservatives in the continental US were former Trotskyists and Lenninists (hell, Irving Kristol was bragging about being a member of the com-intern as late as the 80's, when he wrote his memoirs). But if you look at the ideology, the song and dance is essentially the same: a revolutionary policy that legitimizes violence as a means to an end, a delusional faith in the historical inevitability of your triumph, an idealization of the state as a tool with which to achieve liberation, etc.
Just like most ideology, neo-conservatism is a substitute religion that should be confined to the dustbin of historical blunders.
I've firmly decided that Iraq was never the *real* target in the long run. I do believe they really thought it would be a "cake-walk" because they only saw past using the military to depose Saddam and disband the military; they had no idea the end-game was going to be what it was because, as Brooks noted in the NYTimes this week, they simply didn't know the history of the tribal culture there.
I think the theory they actually had in mind was to scare Iran all along. They took Afghanistan, they have ships in the gulf, Pakistan is an "ally" (of sorts), so taking Iraq would basically have them militarilly surrounded and pressuring them to drop their nuclear program diplomatically would then become a lot more successful. Then, witnessing our "strength", China would see the futility of letting North Korea get away with that crap and would step in to put a stop there.
But instead, they got hung up on visions and buzzwords and the reality that Saddam, "evil" as he was, was the only thing holding that country together finally bit back. Reality has a funny way of doing that...