Rather than being punished, neocon ideologues have advanced, spreading out from their traditional base within think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies to take influential positions at more mainstream and even liberal bastions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Neocon writers also have come to dominate key media platforms, such as the Washington Post's op-ed page. Meanwhile, neocon critics, like "realist" diplomat Chas Freeman and many ex-CIA analysts, have been pushed further to the margins of Washington thought.
In large part, the neocons' consolidation of power despite all the false claims about Iraq resulted from their success in defining the Iraq War troop "surge" in 2007 as the key factor in reducing civil violence.
Thus, they were able to extricate themselves from the Iraq War lies and turn the tables on the critics and "surge" doubters, including Sen. Barack Obama when he was the Democratic presidential candidate.
When Obama argued that the reasons for the dip in violence were more complicated than simply "the surge worked," he was hectored by media questioners, including CBS anchor Katie Couric and ABC's George Stephanopoulos, demanding to know why he wouldn't just admit that Sen. John McCain had been "right" about the surge.
Finally, Obama chose to retreat in the face of this Washington conventional wisdom, regardless of how misguided it was. Finally, he admitted to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
The "Surge' Truth
Obama's cave-in then allowed the neocons and their sympathizers to further ridicule anyone who wouldn't go along. The reversal also was an early sign that Obama would rather finesse than fight over issues of fact, even an important question regarding national security.
Still, many military analysts believed Bush's "surge" of about 30,000 U.S. troops was at best a minor factor in improving Iraq's security climate. For his book, The War Within, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward interviewed a number of military officials and concluded:
"In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge."
Woodward reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.
A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continued success.
Other brutal factors further explained the decline in violence:
--Vicious ethnic cleansing had succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there were fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis were estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.
--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas made "death-squad" raids more difficult but also "cantonized" much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they sought food or traveled to work.
--During the "surge," U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called "military age males" and locking up tens of thousands in prison on the flimsiest of suspicions.
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