"So much for the 'War President'"! On Bush's "Vulcan" advisors

A must-read review of scathing book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, James Mann, Viking Press, 372 pages

Folks -- this is from American Conservative Magazine!

“There was no question that the Vulcans’ venture into Iraq grew out of their previous 35 years of thinking about America’s role in the world. It represented a final step in the transfer of ideas that the Vulcans had formed during the cold war into a post-cold war world—the ideas that the United States should emphasize military strength, should spread its ideals and should not accommodate other centers of power.”
-snip-
Curiously enough, the supposed author of these policies—President George W. Bush—is barely mentioned in this book. He is the man who isn’t there and, obviously in the author’s opinion, the man who didn’t really have much to do with the thinking behind all that he let loose on the world. “He could not have made decisions if the Vulcans had not laid out the choices,” Mann writes in the foreword. “He could not have formulated policy without the words and ideas they brought to him.” (So much for the “War President!”)
-snip-
There are many things one could say about this book, but what I found to be the most compelling storyline of Rise of the Vulcans is the degree to which some of these six, and especially all the others in the War Party around them, are consummate “irregulars” at heart, in thinking and in action. One sees, swimming deeper into the tides within this book, how people like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld in particular were always seeking to work around the system and to do things in an irregular manner and with a special forces or guerrilla/militiaman mentality. All along the way, they knew best—in fact, only they knew how to do things, whether it was the intelligence that was wrong or the analysis of the Soviet Union or the half-wars of the 1990s.
-snip-
In short, this coterie now running the nation is a group of special teams, of special plans, of plans A and B, of clandestine meetings and, at every turn of the road, of going around the system, often deceptively and disdainfully, and instead setting in place alternative, parallel systems to facilitate their movements but also to show their derision for the “regulars” of the institutions. While not making any moral comparisons, this kind of restructuring with parallel groups is exactly what Hitler did with the German military and the S.S. and what Milosevic did with the Yugoslav National Army and his militia groups. The act has an ancient lineage, one far from traditional America.
-snip-
Maybe in the end Vulcans is an appropriate name after all. For Vulcan was a destructive god, not the god of justice but the god of volcanoes and conflagrations. Because he was such a dangerous deity, Vulcan’s temples were properly located outside the cities—another aspect of “irregularity.” Apparently, too, the Washington Vulcans did not know that Vulcan was ultimately thrown off Mount Olympus by Zeus because he was so ugly.
http://amconmag.com/2004_06_07/review.html

LOOK AT THESE TITLES of articles in American Conservative (Pat Buchanon's mag)!! These guys love Bush as much as we do!!
"An Edsel, Not an Empire
By Taki
Like Edsel, like Bush: brilliant presentation followed by total failure

For Shame
By Paul W. Schroeder
What becomes of a country that loses its capacity for repulsion?

Whipping Up a Democracy
By Nicholas von Hoffman
Leaving atrocity to amateurs

A Specter Haunts the GOP
By Timothy P. Carney
Bush wades in to save the Republican Party from principle.

Come Home, America
By Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press, and Harvey M. Sapolsky
The Iraq failure offers an opportunity to rethink American grand strategy

he starts them, and has no conception whatsoever of conflict resolution.

Pre-emption has never been our history. How dare he stand in front of Veteren's of WWII, an AWOL pretending to have a clue.. .?

he does have gall, doesn't he.