“The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles,” he wrote. “Neo-conservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”
Similarly harsh assessments were made by former Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman, famous for his pre-war assessments of an impending “cakewalk” for the U.S. military and for his dead-on assertions that large stockpiles of WMD would be found in the war’s aftermath.
“They (Bush administration neo-cons) turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era,” Adelman has recently stated. “Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly dysfunctional.”
Perle has also blamed the current state of the neo-con movement on “dysfunction” within the Bush administration. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible,” Perle observed in a Vanity Fair article. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.”
Of course there remain the prior mentioned core of hard-liners, steadfast to the point of clear-cut delusion in their refusal to honestly evaluate the state of their philosophy and the practicality of its goals. More chagrined than chastened, they refuse to accept, much less reluctantly acknowledge the clearly emerging status quo which has pushed both they and their product into a capacious receptacle for discredited believers and their beliefs. They are led, of course, by the self-described “War President,” his bizarre vice-President and augmented by the likes of Rumsfeld, Podhorezt and Abrams. Then, of course, there’s Kristol, who would have us believe that the turn of events was wholly predictable.
“Every intellectual group, every political group, goes through a period of mini crackup and reassembles in slightly different ways,” averred Kristol in the Newsweek article. “For a group that’s discredited, an awful lot of people are spending an awful lot of time discrediting us.” Kristol seems undaunted in his belief that, despite the changed political climate, Bush will continue pushing the neo-con agenda noting, “I think Bush is the last neo-con in power.”
“Who Am I? Why Am I Here?”
Not quite, perhaps, but he’s getting close. The loosening of the neo-conservative spell on the American public’s psyche has driven, or nearly driven from congress, any number of staunch neo-cons or their enablers including Republican ex-Senators Rick Santorum driven by voters out of office last November, and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who declined to seek re-election. It nearly drove out Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose marital-like embrace of so many positions neo-con had set him up as a sort of auxiliary Republican just long enough for those stances to force him to seek reelection as an independent. Although Lieberman was, in fact reelected, his refusal to relinquish his grasp on the paramount neo-con issue, blind support for the war, nearly cost him his seat and did cost him his Democratic Party affiliation.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
