Neoconservatives Say 'Blame Bush,
Not Us' for Iraq Disaster

s Iraq slips into chaos and the U.S. government tries to limit the damage from what appears to be the greatest military blunder in American history, the powerful neoconservative intellectuals and political operatives who pushed for and advocated the Iraq invasion are scrambling to shift the blame for the war's failure to President Bush.

In a series of exclusive interviews to be published in Vanity Fair magazine, neocon advocates of the Iraq war say the Bush administration's incompetence is responsible for a shattered Iraq that could erupt into civil war and spread instability throughout the Middle East.

Richard Perle, former chairman of the president's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, told David Rose of Vanity Fair back in February of 2003, "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform." That was a month before the invasion. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding," he said.

He has since changed his mind. Now he is shocked at the behavior of the Iraqis.

"The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," he told Rose in an interview to be published next month.

Perle told Rose that the central cause of the unfolding Iraq catastrophe is a dysfunctional White House under President George Bush.

"The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty," said Perle.

He now says invading Iraq maybe wasn't such a good idea, after all.

"Could we have managed that threat [that Saddam Hussein would give terrorists nuclear, chemical or biological weapons] by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

Neocon theoretician and Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman, another staunch advocate of war, also served on the Defense Policy Board. He argued in an article for the Washington Post in February 2002, "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."

But now he sings a slightly different tune.

"I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era..." Adelman told Rose.

Adelman believes invading Iraq was still a good idea, but that Bush's people didn't do a good enough job. "The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," he said.

Adelman said Bush and the people who executed the war policy weren't "serious people."

Rose said he spent "the better part of two weeks" in discussions with the neocon war advocates. Rose said "all of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played."

Frank Gaffney, a founder of the neocon Center for Security Policy and war proponent, says the fault in Iraq lies with President Bush.
Bush "doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home," he said.

David Frum, another war advocate and former Bush speech writer and columnist for the neoconservative National Review, said he thinks President Bush just didn't really believe in the ideas behind his policies.

"I always believed as a speech writer taht if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything," he said.

Michael Rubin, war advocate and former staffer in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority, blames Bush explicitly for the chaos in Iraq.

"Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric, people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves," he said. But because Bush failed to match rhetoric with action, Bush failed the reformers, he believes.

Perle says the chaos and catastrophe of Iraq isn't his fault, and shouldn't be blamed on the neoconservatives who advocated the invasion. "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this. They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damned tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that," Perle insisted.