I haven’t heard much over the last few years from the cadre of various think tank & media darling necons that were pressing hard for the invasion of Iraq in the early stages leading up to the invasion. They used to be all over the various media, but it seems you’d have to raise a posse to flush one out these days.
If you’re a think tank writer what do you do when your ideas and predictions have been utterly discredited, and many people think you and your ideological fellows are a pack of credulous and analytically incompetent retards.
What are these guys doing for a living these days?
Do you seriously think any of them have had a professional setback?
Name a neocon and I trust that their sinecure at Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute remains. Tenure can also be cushy, but at least academia has the concept of peer review.
William Kristol is a columnist for the NY Times. He has lived on as a talking head and has had no professional setback that I can see. In fact, I often see him on talk shows and I don’t recall anyone really holding him accountable.
I saw him at a cafe in DC one time and I really wish I had said: “My friend Chuck was in the National Guard, he died without ever seeing his baby daughter, enjoy your lunch.” Maybe whatever kept me from saying that keeps other talking heads from calling him out.
I see by your join date that you weren’t a doper before the invasion. Believe me, plenty of us knew it was a mistake at a time. Particularly in the light of the public “invade Iraq under any pretext” ethos of some of the most influential people in the US cabinet, as exemplified by the PNAC names above. Or in other words, to quote Evil Captor, much much.
It was known to about a 99.9% probability that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, based on the inspections carried out by those tasked to do so; our President and his staff elected to (allegedly) believe otherwise. Our professional military leaders openly stated that we would need several hundred thousand troops to occupy the country after the invasion; our President and his staff believed otherwise, with the results that we have seen; Of course the invasion was a mistake.
It’s a little like asking why the commissars and other officials of the Soviet Union who were in charge of production were never called to task for the shoddy quality of the output. Regimes that are ideologically based (and I would count the Republicans) care only about ideological success, not mere physical reality (at least not until physical reality means a bullet to the head).
And anyway with regards to Iraq, the Neocons might be privately disappointed that things worked out so poorly, but they still think it better than to never have invaded at all.
It might not have been true six months before the invasion, but it was certainly true at the time of the invasion, when UN inspectors went to all the places where WMDs were supposedly kept based on US intelligence and found nothing. We know now where the so-called intelligence came from. Remember that the invasion was not UN sanctioned because Bush couldn’t get even a majority of the Security Council to vote for it. (So, no vote was taken.) Also remember that the response to lack of evidence for the WMDs was to shout louder about how urgent it was to invade. Hans Blix said that at the time of the invasion he was convinced there were no WMDs. Plus, the Iraqis clearly didn’t try to make any of them ready, which we would have seen - why hide them when an invasion was imminent anyway? It might have been 99.8%, but it was pretty clear it was a fantasy.