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JD
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NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
« on: 2006-03-09 10:27:37 » |
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"These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?"
http://agonist.org/candy/20060308/neocon_allies_desert_bush_over_iraq
Err...they do not admit they were wrong.
The Independent comes up with 5 putative Neocons. Only one appears to show any regret for supporting the invasion (Sullivan).
Bukley believes that "the objective in Iraq" has failed. He blames Iraqi animosities. If like me, he supported the removal of Saddam then the objective was accomplished in 3 weeks. That Iraq may become another Cambodia or perhaps another Turkey, will de decided by Iraqis.
Francis Fukuyama states the obvious about the insurgency, which, thanks to Red on Red animosity may well have turned the corner towards US/Iraq Government success.
Richard Perle says that the Bush administration "got the war right...[but] the aftermath wrong". I agree with him. Do I still support the invasion? Of course - my reasons were sound then and still are: Respond to the threat and depose the loon.
Andrew Sullivan appears to have gone belly up on Iraq, but then again, he detests Bush for other reasons (mostly Bush's anti-gay position). He still supports the invasion. Google his blog for the post "If we had not gone in" or similar.
George Will bemoans slow progress but does not appear to repudiate his support of the invasion.
That is it. That is the full blast of the 'rats leaving the sinking ship' meme.
I can see that the far left is improving its framing and propaganda, but this is a stretch.
JD
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Hermit
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Re:NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
« Reply #1 on: 2006-03-09 15:08:22 » |
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[Jonathan Davis] Respond to the threat and depose the loon.
[Hermit] Still making assertions in the absense of evidence... Some support for these assertions would be good... Like "what threat" and "from whom" as well as "to whom". Along with what the authority is that you assert for deposing anyone. Even "the loon". Which on the face of it seems to describe George W Bush and Kim Jong Il far better than it does Saddam Hussein. Are you confused again?
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
« Reply #2 on: 2006-03-10 02:12:53 » |
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I'm getting a glimmer from the depths somewhere...the desertion of the intellectuals..; nope it's gone.
It's one thing to have a tent into which people from the outside are attempting to piss. It is an entirely different matter when even just some of the people inside the tent start to join in.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8738
At Last, the Warmongers Are Prepared to Face the Facts and Admit They Were Wrong
Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2006-03-09 20:22. Media
By Rupert Cornwell, The Independent UK
It has taken more than three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and $200bn (£115bn) of treasure - all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But, finally, the neo-conservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words. We were wrong.
The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from William Buckley, venerable editor of The National Review to Andrew Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic, now an influential commentator and blogmeister. The patrician conservative columnist George Will was gently sceptical from the outset. He now glumly concludes that all three members of the original "axis of evil" - not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq - "are more dangerous than when that term was coined in 2002".
Neither Mr Buckley nor Mr Sullivan concedes that the decision to topple Saddam was intrinsically wrong. But "the challenge required more than [President Bush's] deployable resources," the former sadly recognises. "The American objective in Iraq has failed."
For Mr Sullivan, today's mess is above all a testament to American overconfidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naïveté. But he too asserts, in a column in Time magazine this week, that all may not be lost.
Of all the critiques however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads. Its subtitle is "Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy" - and that legacy, Mr Fukuyama argues, is fatally poisoned.
This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Mr Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement.
The PNAC aimed to cement for all time America's triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defence spending, challenging regimes that were hostile to US interests, and promoting freedom and democracy around the world. Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values".
The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by Saddam's WMD, was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a panacea for every ill of the Middle East. The road to Jerusalem, the neo-cons argued, led through Baghdad. And after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else that stood in Washington's way? All that, Mr Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.
Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."
But was it not Mr Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, The End of History and the Last Man, that the whole world was locked on a glide-path to liberal, free-market democracy? Yes indeed. But that book, he points out, argued that the process was gradual, and must unfold at its own pace.
But not only were the neo-cons too impatient. A second error was to believe that an all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a "benevolent hegemony". A third was the gross overstatement of the post 9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order to justify the dubious doctrine of preventive war.
Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neo-cons' aversion to government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq. Thence sprang the mistakes of the occupation period.
Some, however, are resolutely unswayed. In the latest Weekly Standard, Mr Kristol accuses Mr Fukuyama of losing his nerve - of wanting to "retrench, hunker down and let large parts of the world go to hell in a handbasket, hoping the hand-basket won't blow up in our faces."
Christopher Hitchens, the one-time Trotskyist turned neo-con fellow traveller and eternal polemicist, derides Mr Fukuyama for "conceding to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses," and for yearning for a return of Kissingerian realism in foreign affairs.
The fact, however, remains that future Bush policymakers who signed the PNAC nine years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war's most relentless and starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so much to create. Richard Perle, leader of the resident hawks department at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank here, has vanished from the scene. Lewis Libby meanwhile has stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to focus his energy on staying out of jail.
Yet another signatory was Zalmay Khalilzad, now the US ambassador to Iraq. This week even he - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who had the region in his blood - admitted that the invasion had opened "a Pandora's box" that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire Middle East.
Those left in the administration - primarily Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, are not so much neo-conservatives as "Hobbesian unilateralists", concerned to protect and advance US national interests in a lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.
As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but mostly sympathetic to it when she was the President's security adviser - she has metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the White House to the State Department.
It is on George Bush's lips that neo-conservatism most obviously survives - in the commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he proclaims almost daily, and most hubristically in his second inaugural in 2005 that promised to banish tyranny from the earth.
But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure the irony of America's Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine built upon the supposed boundlessness of US power has succeeded only in exposing its limits.
Thus chastened, Mr Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it "realistic Wilsonianism". A better description might be neo-realism. And if that brings a smile to the face of a certain former US high priest of realism with a pronounced German accent, who can blame him?
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Blunderov
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Re:NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
« Reply #3 on: 2006-03-10 02:48:20 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2006-03-10 02:12:53
I'm getting a glimmer from the depths somewhere...the desertion of the intellectuals..; nope it's gone.
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Found it.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1392890
"The Anatomy of Revolution is considered historian Crane Brinton's finest work. In it, he attempted to establish a pattern that most revolutions follow, a sort of blueprint. He gathered data from four distinct revolutions: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution (or Bolshevik Revolution), and the English Civil War. Using these revolutions as models, he came up with four phases that occur in an average revolution:
Symptoms: The middle class, considered by Mr. Brinton as the driving force behind revolutions, loudly expresses its anger over certain economic restraints placed upon it by the government. While these restrictions, such as the Navigation Laws in the American colonies, are not overbearing, they are enough to cause extreme anger. At this point, the government is also incredibly inefficient. The established bureaucracy is breaking down and is unable to effectively manage the country. This could be due to an inept leader like George III or to a chronic money shortage within the government. Finally, the ruling party suffers a desertion by the intellectuals, considered the conscience of society.
The Rising Fever: The rising fever is the escalation of the anger felt by the middle class. The people rise up at this point. The uprising culminates in a climatic battle, such as the storming of the Bastille or the Battles of Lexington and Concorde, and the current governmental structure collapses under the weight of financial debt and popular uprising. The moderates, or political center, then forms a new government. However, the new moderate government proves unable to weather the problems facing it: the management of a nation, a financial crisis, drafting a new constitution, etc.
Crisis: The revolution reaches a head when the moderates, inept at the job of ruling a country, are forcibly and violently removed from power by the radicals, or the political left. At this point, the Reign of Terror begins as the ultra-radicals set about violently exterminating all opposition. In addition, the new government usually embroils itself in a war in its attempt to spread the ideals of the revolution. The revolution is also beginning to lose steam, with the people only supporting it because of the constant threat of purges. Plus, because of an ever-worsening economic crisis, the revolutionaries are facing an ever-growing internal threat.
Convalescence: With the revolution winding down, the country now enters a period of recovery. A strong, central ruler, such as George Washington or Stalin, comes to power in the new government and begins the process of stabilizing the country. The most violent leaders of the revolution, such as Robespierre, are either discredited or executed. However, the moderates are generally granted amnesty. The people also begin to throw off any remaining signs of the revolution, radically changing their dress and way of life in an attempt to forget it. In the process they abandon many of the radical beliefs held by the revolutionaries.
Mr. Brinton concludes that, in the end, most revolutions generally end up back where they started. Some new ideas emerge, the power structure shifts slightly, some reforms are undertaken, and the worst of the old order is removed. However, the status quo becomes one similar to the pre-revolutionary one as the ruling class again begins to grab power.
While Mr. Brinton did not create an absolute pattern that all revolutions follow, the American Revolution being a notable exception, he did create a general course that most follow. Despite criticism that Brinton used the French Revolution as a model, as every step described above happened perfectly in it, and fit the other revolutions to the French one, The Anatomy of Revolution has stood the test of time and remains one of the definitive Twentieth Century historical treatises.
The Anatomy of Revolution was published, in its present form, in March 1966."
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Blunderov
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Re:NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
« Reply #5 on: 2006-03-11 01:51:39 » |
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[Blunderov] The desertion of the intellectuals continues apace.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8764
Paul Krugman: Bush's New Critics
Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2006-03-10 13:20. Media
By Paul Krugman, New York Times
The Conservative Epiphany, Bush's New Critics, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept." It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."
Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he's saying now. Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too.
Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators... But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.
According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.
Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.
And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.
The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts. ... The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.
But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.
It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?
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