Death of the neocons: Part 2 (continued)

Richard Perle and Wolf square off on CNN. See the clip for yourself here at Raw Story. My take: Perle is shameless; may he rot in hell.

Neocon deathwatch: part 2

Part 2 on the individuals of a dead school of political thought - the neocons.

Richard "The Prince of Darkness" Perle. This guy really screwed the pooch. He was a major cheerleader for war, and now points his finger directly back at BushCo after they turned Iraq into a steaming mess. In 2002, Perle infamously predicted only 40,000 troops would be needed to overthrow Saddam.

Perle's hubris hit a high water mark right before the invasion, when he wrote:

Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him.

Perle served in the administration on the Defense Policy Board, when he tendered his resignation in 2004.

"We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated," Perle wrote. "I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the president at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign."

Perle didn't return a telephone call seeking comment on his resignation, and a Pentagon spokesman would confirm only that he had resigned.

By 2006, Perle was ripping BushCo on the job in Iraq in a famous Vanity Fair article.

Perle and I [writer David Rose] [met] at his home outside Washington, D.C. ... Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity[.]" ...

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "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."

Perle followed up on that with a NewsMax interview in February of this year. I've highlighted a few items - the interview is longish - but telling about the dark soul of this man.

[P]erhaps folks would better appreciate Richard Perle ... discussing how we got where we are in Iraq with the best and brightest leading the way.


Perle: We just don't have the best and the brightest. I think Colin Powell was a disaster. He never liked the president's policies. He did almost nothing to get them implemented. Condi [former head of the National Security Council and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] was in way over her head from the beginning, and the president gave much too much weight to her views. The administration was full of people even in the White House at the National Security Council who were hostile to the president's policies.


NewsMax: On the subject of your "America at a Crossroads" segment for PBS: In one of your filmed confrontations with protestors on the National Mall, you tell a woman, "I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm not the president." You're saying to her that you are not the architect of the war and you didn't make the decisions. But you were a powerhouse on the Defense Policy Board.


Perle: As a matter of fact, I was not at all happy with the conduct of the board. Now people can differ about what approach would have been more effective. I think we got ourselves, unfortunately, into an occupation [of Iraq] that we could have avoided. We could have avoided it by turning things over to the Iraqis more or less immediately, which is what I was arguing for.


NewsMax: How do you see it playing out on Capitol Hill?


Perle: The House and the Democratic leadership have decided to make Iraq a partisan political issue. They are using it to rally Democrats, and it seems to me that they have lost all sight of the national interest.

NewsMax: Now that Al Franken has declared for the U.S. Senate...

Perle: ...Franken was hung up on the fact that we didn't find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that whole thing gets a little tedious after a while.


The president didn't create [the intelligence organizations]. He made the mistake of keeping [former CIA chief George] Tenet in place, but that is another matter.

So, in the end, Perle is one of the key architects of the war, yets minimizes his own role - certainly after Iraq turns into one hell of a FUBAR wrapped in an enigma. And not only is he saddled with the burden of his gross mistakes, he turns around and blames BushCo for the problems.

I suppose that Perle really believes that the Iraq war - if run competently - could have turned out far better than it has. What a terrible misreading of the situation. But these kinds of misreadings are why the NeoCons are consigned to the kitty litter box of history.

Perle Status: Richard Perle is dead to George Dubya Bush.

Break out the french fries, brie and croissants!

An important new poll is out. I'll jump right to it:

Public Agenda and its partner Foreign Affairs today made public the fourth edition of the Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index (CFPI)...

The Spring 2007 Anxiety Indicator stands at 137, well above the neutral
mid-point of 100 and a seven point increase since September 2006. "The
Anxiety Indicator is moving closer to the 150 mark, the 'red zone' that to
me would signal a full blown crisis of public confidence," said Public
Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich. Full report at: publicagenda.org/CFPI4

-- Public support for military solutions in many scenarios is virtually
off the table for most of the public. In dealing with Iran, support
for possible military action is in the single digits (8 percent)

-- 70 percent say that criticism that the United States has been too
quick to resort to war is at least partly justified (31 percent say
it's "totally justified"). On what the government must do to fight
terrorism, 67 percent say we should put more emphasis on diplomatic
and economic methods, while 27 percent say more emphasis on military
efforts

-- 84 percent say "initiating military force only when we have the
support of our allies" should be important to our foreign policy (51
percent say "very important")

Great news, Francophiles! Break out the Croque Monsieur, Perrier with a twist, and a nice bottle of Burgundy for lunch. Yes, in honor of the French, go and take a three-hour lunch.

Bill "Nostradumbass" Kristol may want to join you. He needs a three hour lunch. And he needs to get drunk. Just be ready lots of tears and self-pity.

Here are links to the full report, and analysis by the authors.

Iraq in the News - How bad will we lose and those sliding benchmarks

Two articles on Iraq are up today. First, a series of experts predicts how Iraq may eventually turn out. Second, the NYT reports today about those sliding benchmarks that BushCo set down before the surge.

From the Rolling Stone article on Iraq predictions, this quote from retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak:

Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now. Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again.

I will let each of you read the article in full to see the range of predictions. They range from beyond awful to merely terrible. No one thinks the US is going to come out of this with a win. Ever.

In checking the list of experts, I was both heartened and discouraged that Robert Kagan or Kill "The Vampire" Kristol (AKA Nostradumbass) weren't included in the discussion. I was heartened because these idiots frankly belong in jail for the blood spilled, prestige lost and money wasted on The Stupid Pointless War. OTOH, I would have enjoyed the other experts smacking these idiotic neocons around, just for the fun of it.

The other article is relevant here because this speaks directly to how things are going in Iraq - in the midst of the surge - and how things may be turning out.

The Bush administration, which six months ago issued a series of political goals for the Iraqi government to meet by this month, is now tacitly acknowledging that the goals will take significantly longer to achieve.

In interviews this week, administration officials said that the military buildup intended to stabilize Baghdad and create the conditions for achieving the objectives would not be fully in place until June and that all of the objectives would not be fulfilled until the year’s end.

A “notional political timeline” that the administration provided to Congress in January in an attachment to a letter from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had called for most of the objectives to be met by this month.

Dan Froomkin has been railing against the mainstream media for failing to report on benchmark progress. Well Dan, here some progress on the reporting of the benchmarks. So, we have movement on the media side, but not much else.

Bottom line: Until Iraqis can learn to live together and forge meaningful political (read - political NOT military) solutions, the Iraq wound will fester indefinitely.

Iraq War costs keep surging

Here's a really depressing article:

America won't simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

The article is excellent, and worth reading in its entirety, but here's a sobering clip:

To draw attention to her academic findings, [Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist Linda] Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down.

Matters did not rest there. Despite its independence from the Pentagon, the VA is run by Robert James Nicholson, a former Republican Party chairman and Bush's loyal political appointee. Following Bilmes's exchange with Winkenwerder - on 10 January, to be precise - the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. The Bush administration had, once again, turned reality on its head to concur with its claims. "The whole thing is scary," Bilmes says. "I have never been conspiracy-minded, but watching them change the numbers on the website - it's extraordinary."

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle. Bilmes and Stiglitz had set out, meantime, to explore the ratio of wounded to deaths in previous American wars. They found that in the First World War, on average 1.8 were wounded for every fatality; in the Second World War, 1.6; in Korea, 2.8; in Vietnam, 2.6; and, in the first Gulf war in 1991, 1.2. In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

The researchers went on to cite a series of areas where BushCo was wrong, wrong, and wrong again in their prognostications.

Meanwhile a new report was published with this disturbing finding:

Background Veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) have endured high combat stress and are eligible for 2 years of free military service–related health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system, yet little is known about the burden and clinical circumstances of mental health diagnoses among OEF/OIF veterans seen at VA facilities.

Methods US veterans separated from OEF/OIF military service and first seen at VA health care facilities between September 30, 2001 (US invasion of Afghanistan), and September 30, 2005, were included. Mental health diagnoses and psychosocial problems were assessed using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes. The prevalence and clinical circumstances of and subgroups at greatest risk for mental health disorders are described herein.

Results Of 103 788 OEF/OIF veterans seen at VA health care facilities, 25 658 (25%) received mental health diagnosis(es); 56% of whom had 2 or more distinct mental health diagnoses. Overall, 32 010 (31%) received mental health and/or psychosocial diagnoses. Mental health diagnoses were detected soon after the first VA clinic visit (median of 13 days), and most initial mental health diagnoses (60%) were made in nonmental health clinics, mostly primary care settings. The youngest group of OEF/OIF veterans (age, 18-24 years) were at greatest risk for receiving mental health or posttraumatic stress disorder diagnoses compared with veterans 40 years or older.

I am not at all surprised that a full one-fourth of returning vets have mental problems. I am, however, deeply appalled.

Nepotism in the Surge

When I grow up, or if my blog grows up (LOL, not very likely), I want to be Glen Greenwald. Writing yesterday under the tagline, Why would any rational person listen to Robert Kagan?:

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan -- whose brother, Frederick, is the architect of the President's "surge" plan -- has a column in the Post this morning predictably assuring us that the surge is a great success. The headline is "The 'Surge' is Succeeding," and you already know what it says without reading it. The Evil Media has claimed the war is lost. But now it is clear that they are wrong. We sent more troops, the Great Gen. Petraeus has arrived, stores have re-opened, and Pajama Media bloggers Mohammed and Omar say things are getting better. Thus, Kagan says, there "is a new chapter in the story."

Greenwald goes on to list a series of WRONG predictions and statements about how things have been going in Iraq made by Kagan and his fellow neo-con Bill "The Vampire" Kristol (aka Nostradumass).

And there's more today from Greenwald: It turns out that Frederick's wife, writing for the Weekly Standard, also has a pro-surge article out. Color me not surprised.

Frankly, I can't expect much else from the Standard. Their flagpoles seemingly rise if they even think about the Surge. But Greenwald makes an excellent point that the Washington Post should disclose this absurd conflict of interest. WaPo tries so hard to appear even-handed, I think they miss out on what's fundementally right and wrong.

Plus, they must maintain their access to power, after all.