Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke.
For as he prepares to "surge" 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we "are not winning," his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations.
Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war that they, the "Vulcans," so brilliantly conceived.
Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9-11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bushite incompetence that fouled it up.
"The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," wails Ken Adelman, who had famously predicted in The Washington Post that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."
Bush's team of Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, says Adelman, "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." Their incompetence, he adds, "means that most everything we ever stood for ... lies in ruins."
Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, whose book on war leaders Bush used to carry about, says his mistake was in not knowing "how incredibly incompetent" the Bush team would be.
Richard Perle is sickened by the consequences of the war he and his comrades so ardently championed. "The levels of brutality ... are truly horrifying, and, I have to say, I underestimated the depravity."
Calling the Bush policy process a "disaster," Perle blames Bush himself: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. ... I don't think he realizes the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
This is the second fallback position of the War Party. Not only incompetence, but treachery made a nightmare of their vision.
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