I like “smig”! It’s just a neologism waiting for a definition!
Smug prig.
Excellent! He is indeed smig!
Excellent.
There’s more than enough blame for both camps, and their rather substantial overlap. Which brings me to Perle:
As Kevin Drum adroitly responds:
Also, Perle himself was Chair of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, and while that was an advisory rather than a policy role, he most certainly had the ear of the policymakers during that time.
Kevin Drum has fun with David Frum:
Drum:
I’d personally walk the root causes back one step further, to the fact that the big money boys who financed Bush’s Presidential runs thought it was a great idea to have an empty suit as President. But other than that, Kevin has Frum - and Bush - nailed.
Taking further advantage of early-a.m. insomnia to shoot more fish in the barrel:
It’s pretty clear in retrospect that Cheney and Rumsfeld - two of Perle’s neocon buddies - were running our Iraq strategy. Sure, the President deserves the responsibility for not being fully President, but that doesn’t get Perle’s team off the hook; it gets the hook more firmly embedded in them.
That was two years ago, dude. I see you were in a big hurry to share. :rolleyes:
Insomnia? RT, I’m up before this EVERY DAY. Dogs, kids and pubs, man. It’s a recipe for lack-o-sleep.
I understand your point about their being blame to spread around but for all of me when the root assumption is flawed can much blame really be assigned to those attempting to carry out the plan?
Perle was interviewed on BBC radio yesterday. In precis he said “my words were accurately quoted, but editorial around them was inaccurate”.
Interesting that the PNAC Iraq page hasn’t been updated for more than a year.
The David Frum quote is really quite shocking, even given how things have gone. He thinks that is arse-covering? Scary, scary stuff.
President didnt pull the decisions out of his ass. He received info from his people which was false. They denied cherry picking the intelligence to support actions they were mentally committed to.Time has proven many in the CIA told them they were wrong. It was the neocon plan in action.
Why the hell does Chalabi have ant access at all. What a lying self aggrandizing prick he is. HE should have zero credibility by now.
There’s something fishy about Perle’s position.
It would seem, from the cited story, that he says that going to war was a mistake. However, if it had been better planned and executed it would have worked anyway.
So does he mean that even a bad idea is OK when it gains its ends because of good planning and execution?
There is a symposium on nationalreview.com where David Frum, Richard Perle, Michael Ledden and Michael Rubin discuss how “Vanity Fair” twisted their words. Like so many left wingers, “Vanity Fair” is upset a psychopathic mass murderer who had Weapons of Mass Destruction and supportedc terrorists has been removed and a democracy installed. So naturally “Vanity Fair” would lie and twist staements…it is what leftwingers do everyday. They pine over the mass murderers and filth the world has produced: Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, Arafat, Amin when they are not ridiculing the brave people who remove such slime.
Cheney and Rumsfeld weren’t and aren’t neocons. They’re businessmen and foreign policy realists.
Yea, the Iraq war hasn’t turned out well. That doesn’t mean that overthrowing Sadaam and trying to set up a democratic government in Iraq was a bad itdea. It just means that the administration, including its neocon members, should have had a better plan. They should have had plans for what to do after Baghdad fell, they should have put more troops and money in (troops to close the borders, provide security and stop looting and rioting, money to begin reconstruction of the infrastructure), and they should have both realized and convinced the American people that we would have to have troops in Iraq for a while, up to ten years after the war.
The administration didn’t do any of that, and they’re paying for it now, as, unfortunately, ar e US soldiers and the Iraqi people.
It’s not the fault of the neocons, or any of those fine, keen-minded, brilliant strategist guys that Iraq has all gone to hell. No, no – it’s those dumb broads around the President:
We’ll spot you “mass murderer”. Where did you get the other stuff from?
Damn the facts, full speed ahead!
We need a cite where Vanity Fair said they are upset for that reason.
Nope, if no cite is produced then it naturally follows that it is you who is lying.
2 lies in a row. there are some extremists that do that, but like in my case and many others we have ridiculed all those dictators before.
The reason why there is ridicule for the removers of the current Saddam slime is that the removers lied to the American people to get into Iraq and equated Iraq with the war against terror and showed incompetence in securing the place.
The impression I get is that of the kid getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, of course they have concerns about the mistakes being made on the war! But Vanity Fair lied to us when they said this was not going to be published before the elections!
Some defense.
In any case it is not unexpected, many already got the feeling these neocons were not repenting and I do think it is very good for all to see that these guys are still denying there were no weapons of mass destruction or everything was hunky dory on the way to war or that the current Iraqi allies are independent from the US. IOW if they think this helps their cause they have another thing coming.
And in related news . . .
In 1999 the US did some war gaming vis-a-vis Iraq and determined that it would take 400,00 troops to keep order in Iraq after the conquest. And even that might not be enough manpower.
Not, of course, that the present administration has ever had the slightest inclination to look to the preceeding admin for suggestions.
FWIW, I used “Repents” in the title of this thread in the broader sense of “changes his mind”. Technically correct, but the actual Vanity Fair piece makes it clear Perle is wallowing in hindsight.