The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts - NYT

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 16, 2004

After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there's a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.

Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq's problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/weekinreview/16tier.html

The problem, in my humble, is not that this is akin to leftists blaming the Kremlin. It is that the neocon religion is so powerful, so self-supporting, so self-aggrandizing, that it blinds the listeners and believers to any other message. These guys had in their hands a well-researched, well-planned book on how to deal with Iraq post-war. State spent millions on it, and considering that State's intel unit was the only one that had strong doubts about all of the justifications for Bush's Little Iraqi Vacation, I suspect that it probably might have worked.

The neocons in the Pentagon and WH shitcanned the State book. They decided that they knew better, even though no one even studied the problem. They even created a hand-picked intel unit staffed by other neocons to give them even more support for their loony ideas.

I suspect that true conservatives would be quite acceptable here, because many of their ideals and ideas are not so different from ours. They don't want government screwing things up or sticking their noses into our bedrooms, either. I also suspect that true conservatives are seeing that Rummy and Wolfie and Cheney are so full off it, that they begin to wonder if the president is an idiot, or really devious and part of their cabal. I suspect the latter myself. And this cabal is dangerous to our country's future, more so than any terrorist org.

out of office, I won't trust them one damn bit either.

Then they will do whatever the hell they want.

They are totalitarian obscurantists. It is amazing how military failure affects the movements followers. Now they all pretend to be discriminating observers of political reality instead of carping propagandists.

When political agendas throw out any moral concepts and
champion "the end justifies the means" the results are usually a
disaster. The NeoFascists distributed extra thick rose colored glasses to their cult members.

THAT should be the headline.

EVERYTHING the antiwar movement warned about has come to pass.

Bush was lying about every single item that he used to justify this war.

The region is much more unstable than it was before.

Iraq has become a source of instability.

The US position in the region and the world is immeasurably worse than before the war.

Bush made really bad, disastrous decisions, showed incredibly poor judgement, as did everyone who went along for the ride with him.

Yet the media is still propping up his decision to go to war...

"A basic tenet of conservatism is that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them - much easier, and more fun, too."

So *&co have simply been having fun destroying things, at home and abroad.

The piece names quite a few of the neocons who have become neodoubters and neocritics of the White House's execution of the Iraq war:

David Brooks
Robert Novak
Max Boot
Thomas Friedman
Robert Kagan
Bill Kristol
Andrew Sullivan

Great column. It was printed in Sunday's Atlanta Journal Constitution, by the way.