R. Perle and Neocons Nonsense Revisited

The other thread keeps timing out so… apologies for rehashing in a new thread… but… some points… Big surprise about the timing of that article and its title which surprise surprise came out after the midterm elections in a much different form. Biased media? No way!

[quote]In the late fall of 2006, a number of my friends and colleagues spoke to British journalist David Rose about our feelings about the management of the Iraq war. Rose is a contributor to Vanity Fair and the Observer who had worked the Iraq beat for a long time and had supported the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein.

Vanity Fair magazine released an advance version of Rose’s piece on the eve of the November 2006 elections. Just about everyone who had spoken to Rose complained that the Vanity Fair release distorted and sensationalized what had been said. (You can read comments by Elliott Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Michael Rubin here.) I too reacted negatively:

There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report. Headlined “Now They Tell Us,” it purports to offer an “exclusive” access to “remorseful” former supporters of the Iraq war who will now “play the blame game” with “shocking frankness.” …

I can speak only for myself. Obviously I wish the war had gone better. It’s true I fear that there is a real danger that the U.S. will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of U.S .policy.

I have made these points literally thousands of times since 2004, beginning in An End to Evil and most recently in my 22-part commentary on Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (start here and find the remainder here.) I have argued them on radio and on television and on public lectern, usually in exactly the same words that are quoted in the press release. …

Nothing exclusive there, nothing shocking, and believe me, nothing remorseful.

My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous.
At the time, I distinguished between the work of Rose the journalist and the ideological and publicity imperatives of Vanity Fair the institution.

Rose has earned a reputation as a truth teller. The same unfortunately cannot be said for the editors and publicists at Vanity Fair. They have repackaged truths that a war-fighting country needs to hear into lies intended to achieve a shabby partisan purpose.

I’m glad I did. The full piece was published just before Christmas. I read and reread it over the holidays, and it is a far more fair-minded and thoughtful piece than the piece of campaign pamphleteering posted by the magazine in November. He has let his subjects speak for themselves. He has presented his own point of view (as any writer is of course entitled to do) while respecting the points of view of his subjects.

That said, some comments:

  1. Where did this idea come from that either you support and applaud everything the administration has done in Iraq - or else you have turned your back on the whole thing? Intense debate over strategy and tactics is exactly what you would expect in a democracy at war. Those who support a war’s aims do not always or even usually support every element of a war’s execution.

  2. Whatever you think of Richard Perle, or Ken Adelman, or (for that matter) me, it is simply a fact that none of us have had anything remotely like operational responsibility for the conduct of the war. I don’t say that as any kind of excuse for anything, nor am I trying to reprise that ancient Washington favorite, “If only they had listened to me.”

Still, there is somthing weird about the fact that a Google search for “Richard Perle” and “Iraq war” pulls up 281,000 entries - while a similar search for “Meghan O’Sullivan” and “Iraq war” pulls up 180. Meghan O’Sullivan, for those of you who don’t know, is the National Security Council senior director with responsibility for Iraq and Afghanistan.

How is it that so many in the media show so much more interest in a group that supported the war than they do in the group that actually ran the war?

  1. One thing I said to Rose has given rise to some misunderstandings:

I always believed as a speechwriter that 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.

Some have interpreted these words as an accusation (or boast?) that the president was some kind of mouthpiece for his writers or other manipulators. That’s not at all what I had in mind.

The president’s writers try to anticipate his thoughts and articulate his principles. But in every administration, unexpected questions arise - things that were lesser priorities suddenly become more important - and new facts call into question old commitments. That is very much what happened to the Bush administration after 9/11. Foreign policy, a lower priority, suddenly became supreme. Explaining - and responding to - Middle Eastern religious extremism became one of the defining missions of the Bush administration.

Many alternative explanations were available to the administration.

Some believe that Middle Eastern extremism is a more or less reasonable or anyway predictable consequence of wrongs and injuries inflicted on the Middle East by the peoples of the West. Others believe that Middle Eastern extremism arises naturally out of the region’s history and society, or out of the defects of Arab or Islamic political culture. Still others attribute it to the pressures of globalization, or to repressed sexuality, or on and on through the catalogue.

The view that the administration settled on, however, was very different view: that Middle Eastern terrorism was traceable to the undemocratic politics of the region. President Bush expressed this view most forcefully in his second inaugural address:

We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

These words were not drafted by the president, obviously, but neither were they imposed on him. They were proposed to him by a team of speechwriters who anticipated what they supposed to be his thoughts:

a) Tyranny leads to resentment.

b) Resentment breeds ideologies that excuse murder.

c) Murderers will seek the deadliest weapons they can find.

d) Those weapons can threaten the American homeland.

e) Therefore: American security requires the US to help defeat tyranny and promote freedom in other lands.

Maybe this was good reasoning, maybe it was bad. But good or bad: you would suppose it had been deeply considered. Having declared war on tyranny, it hardly makes sense to expect the help and ccooperation of the tyrants in question. Right? And yet, the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been founded on the assumption that the military regime in Pakistan wishes the US to succeed in Afghanistan and that the authoritarian regimes of the Persian Gulf wish the US to succeed in Iraq.

When I complained of the president speaking words but not grasping ideas, this was what I meant. When a president commits himself to the spread of democracy in the Middle East and Islamic world, he is committing himself to policies that many in the region will find profoundly uncongenial, if not threatening. His calculations have to take into account the likelihood that those who object to his policies will try to thwart and sabotage them.

But no such calculation seems to have occurred. The administration signed up for a war on Middle Eastern tyranny on the happy assumption that it could count on the tyrants to aid in their undoing. It promised a revolution and expected the revolution’s targets to unlock the gates of their own Winter Palaces.

Well, “expect” may be the wrong word here, because in fact there was no real revolution in the offing. The US alliance with the Saudi monarchy has flourished through the Bush years - indeed Robin Wright reports in her most recent article for the Washington Post that it was Saudi opposition (and not the protests of the supposedly omnipotent neocons) that deep-sixed James Baker’s call for direct US-Iran talks:

The Sunni kingdom sees Iran as a threat because of Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. The kingdom also fears the shifting balance of power — under Iran’s tutelage — between minority Shiites and majority Sunnis, who have dominated Middle East politics for almost 14 centuries. The monarchy faces its own restive Shiite minority in the main oil-producing province.

The kingdom grew particularly alarmed as the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group began to leak out last month, with recommendations that the administration talk to both Iran and Syria, say U.S. officials and sources close to the royal family. Even before the report was released, Abdullah summoned Cheney to again warn about Iran and the regional implications of its growing influence — and offer Saudi assistance and discuss joint U.S.-Saudi efforts.

Such actions are not easily squared with the president’s words - and that difficulty reconciling words and actions inspired my doubts how much the words had ever really meant.[/quote]

frum.nationalreview.com/