W's being led out in front of the cameras and Perle is playing Ruby.
From DailyKos.com
Perle checks out; blames others
by kos
Fri Nov 03, 2006 at 05:00:40 PM CST
Even the chief neocons are jumping ship.
A group of neoconservatives led by former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Richard Perle and former Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman tell Vanity Fair that they blame the "dysfunctional" Bush administration for the "disaster" in Iraq and say that if they had it to do over again they would not advocate an invasion of Iraq.
Of course, they're not faulting their fantastical reality-addled theories or their lack of historical grasp, but Bush and his ability to deal with the "disloyal" saboteurs in the administration.
Perle tells Vanity Fair that, "at the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.... [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him."
Adelman tells Vanity Fair that when he wrote in 2002 that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," he "just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
Adelman also tells Vanity Fair that "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."
Of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whom Adelman says he is "very, very fond of," he admits, "I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."
Adelman adds that he "checked out" of this administration the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former C.I.A. director George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer--"three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots."
You've got to hand it to these jokers -- eager to point fingers anywhere but at themselves.
If a building collapses from poor engineering, do you blame the engineers and architects who designed it, or the grunts who implemented the plan?
The problem here wasn't that the implementation was poor, but that the plan was never going to work. But of course the "serious" people in DC furrowed their brows in gravitas-building seriousness and shepherded the media and the country toward this epic disaster.
Bush's failure was 1) in greenlighting the plan, as if he had the capacity to evaluate it on its merits, and 2) in creating an environment where those who urged caution were quickly kicked off the team.
But there isn't a team alive that could've given us a different outcome in Iraq. That's why people like me opposed it from the start. Not because of any affinity for Saddam, but because we loved our country too much to let it get sucked into this kind of endless disaster.
