Now come the denials

It wasn't me, I wasn't there, it must have been somebody else...

In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday's forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which:

1. Perle is not a neoconservative.

2. Neoconservatives do not exist.

3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years.

"There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. "It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy."

So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that is widely seen as the cornerstone of neoconservative foreign policy? "My name was on it because I signed up for the study group," Perle explained. "I didn't approve it. I didn't read it."

The last eight years never happened....

Impeach

Impeachment or jail time. We need to see justice done.

And I want my money back.

'Create a wasteland and call it peace'

Describes the Neocon agenda. The quote comes from Tacitus describing the Roman senators getting fat and greedy as they send the soldiers out to ravage nations. Matthew Carr at the First Post makes you recoil in horror seeing the truly ugly warmongering souls of Richard Perle, and John Bolton:

The war trolls would have us believe that they are the grown-ups, defending us from the coming barbarism. But watch out next time you see them on Newsnight. Behind the oily gravitas of the prince of darkness lies a different kind of barbarism. And look closely at the gleaming eyes of the ex-UN ambassador with his walrus moustache. You might just detect a big kid, living out a fantasy of violence and control, while he operates the PlayStation game that just happens to be the world the rest of us live in.

And speaking of looking into the eyes and into the minds of the Bush Administration, you have to read Morse's latest masterpiece at The Republic of Sestakastan.

Look carefully at the last frame of Bolton's glasses....

On the edge

The Europeans are afraid:

Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the US administration will resort to air strikes against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.

As transatlantic friction over how to deal with the Iranian impasse intensifies, there are fears in European capitals that the nuclear crisis could come to a head this year because of US frustration with Russian stalling tactics at the UN security council. "The clock is ticking," said one European official. "Military action has come back on to the table more seriously than before. The language in the US has changed."

[snip]

The Americans and Europeans have sought to maintain a common front on the nuclear issue for the past 30 months, with the European troika of Britain, France and Germany running failed negotiations with the Iranians and the Americans tacitly supporting them.

But diplomats in Brussels and those dealing with the dispute in Vienna say a fissure has opened up between the US and western Europe on three crucial aspects - the military option; how and how quickly to hit Iran with economic sanctions already decreed by the UN security council; and how to deal with Russian opposition to action against Iran through the security council.

"There's anxiety everywhere you turn," said a diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "The Europeans are very concerned the shit could hit the fan."

Perle approves:

Perle expressed astonishment at the lack of support granted by the West to Iranian opposition movements who wish to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs.

"I'm not convinced that we have a lot of time. Given the peril that would result, its astonishing to me that we do not now have a serious political strategy with Iran," he said, adding he thought regime change is "the only significant effective way" to deal with the Iranian threat.

"If we continue on our current course, we have only a military option. So what I'm urging, and this should have happened a very long time ago, is that we make a serious effort to work with the internal (Iranian) opposition," Perle said.

The White House is delaying the sharing of intelligence that proves Iranian involvement in Iraq:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials promised last week to provide evidence of Iranian activities that led President Bush to announce Jan. 10 that U.S. forces would begin taking the offensive against Iranian agents who threatened Americans.

But some officials in Washington are concerned that some of the material may be inconclusive and that other data cannot be released without jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods. They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect, said the officials, who described the internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

Cheney demands it:

The US continues to develop plans to strike Iran, according to an article in the UK Times which was detailed Wednesday in the Jerusalem Post.

According to the Times, the Bush Administration has been inviting defense consultants and Middle East experts to meetings for "tactical advice." RAW STORY has reported frequenly on US-Iran tensions, revealing that Vice President Cheney's office is the biggest advocate of a military strike.

Bush Administration officials deny the claim. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said in a radio interview Thursday that the US still believes tensions with Iran can be resolved diplomatically.

Still, Burns notes that "all options are on the table."

And the Pentagon is preparing:

In September, RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna reported that the Pentagon's top brass had moved into second-stage contingency planning for a potential military strike on Iran, according to a senior intelligence official familiar with the plans.

The official, who is close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking officials of each branch of the US military, said the Chiefs have started what is called "branches and sequels" contingency planning.

"The JCS has accepted the inevitable," the intelligence official said, "and is engaged in serious contingency planning to deal with the worst case scenarios that the intelligence community has been painting."

A second military official, although unfamiliar with these latest scenarios, said there is a difference between contingency planning -- which he described as "what if, then what" planning -- and "branches and sequels," which takes place after an initial plan has been decided upon.

Nicole Belle has more links. As does Pamela Leavey.

And Scout Prime mentions the buildup of US warships.

The circular blame squad

The Republicans show who invented the blame game. Now they are blaming Liddy Dole and Bush.








Sinfonian has more of the whining.

The plan was brilliant! Bush was just incompetent.

So says Perle about Bush's attempt to push the neocon agenda.

"According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the Bush administration. The policy process has been nothing short of "disastrous," he 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 think he was led to believe that things were chugging along far more purposefully and coherently than in fact they were. I think he didn't realize the depth of the disputes underneath. I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.""
[snip]
"Kenneth Adelman, a longtime neocon activist and Pentagon insider who has served on the Defense Policy Board, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing, "I believe that demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I am extremely disappointed by the outcome in Iraq, because I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN'T DO. And that's very different from LET'S GO.""


Btw, didn't they also say that about communism, that the theory was wonderful, but the implementation of it was where it failed?