Cry Me A Tigris River

In his Vanity Fair latest article (nonsensically titled “Neo Culpa”) David Rose provides a lamenting violin score to teary-eyed neocons whose dreams of greatness now lie crumpled like so much snot-soaked tissue paper.

Rose writes “As he [Richard Perle] looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle 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.”

Ah yes, poor, homeless, dissident Chalabi; forced to wander the streets of Washington until the kind neocons took him in, gave him hope, a home and $300 million of taxpayer’s money.
(poot!) (sniff)—Is someone chopping onions in here?

Anyway, Perle continues;
"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'
But above all, Perle says “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" .

So, to summarize:

The Iraq clusterfuck that Perle both promoted and shaped is the fault of the millions who didn’t protest loudly enough, the Iraq Experts Group who failed to send him their risk analysis, General Shinsecki who failed to insist on enough troops, Joe Wilson, the IAEA, the U.N. and finally George Bush for not realizing how opposed his own party was to the invasion.

Basically Perle just mentioned in passing that invading Iraq might be a good idea, but as it’s turned out, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea at all—but should he be blamed for that?

Recognizing that Perle “is now plagued with doubt” (and in need of a hug) Rose then wonders “What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think… how do his comrades-in-arms feel?”

Gosh yes! What do his comrades-in-arms feel? Do they feel as bad as the comrades-without-arms that actually served in the war? Are the poor little neocons sad? Is something bothering them? Would they like to share their feelings?
Rose writes that he expected “disappointment” but instead finds “despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.”
Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Defense Policy Board member until 2005 said in a Washington Post op-ed in February 2002 that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "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. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
Adelman again: "I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him"
Richard Perle: "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 damn tired of being described as an architect of the war."

Perle, Adelman and Rubin didn’t just champion the invasion of Iraq as a matter of belief, but as a policy that they developed and acted upon. Perle was indeed an architect of the war, as was Wolfowitz and it was their friends and co-conspirators—Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Bolton along with their minions--who executed the actions and principles with which they all agreed and who crushed all dissent and rational consideration by not only exercising the executive power afforded them but also by increasing that power not for their “moral” foreign policy goals but to intimidate and destroy any challenge to their self-appointed roles as the guardians and champions of their privileged, blinkered vision of the future of America, democracy and the world.

For these disgusting creatures to claim “disappointment”, for these individuals to blame their co-conspirators and reserve none for themselves and to plead betrayal and victimization is utterly beyond the pale.
These people are as guilty as any who were tried in Nuremburg for engaging in a war of aggression—not defense, as they claimed—and for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, simply to satisfy their vision of the world which had no more legitimacy or reasoned argument to support it than did the governments of Hitler or Stalin or Pol-Pot or any other regime led and sustained by mindless apparatchiks convinced of their own superiority.

And now Perle is complaining that his comments weren’t supposed to be published until after the mid term elections?!!!
He doesn’t even apologize for his role in the Iraq debacle, and yet he chastises David Rose for quoting him?!!!
This fucker, a former policy-maker is apparently upset because despite Rose’s best efforts to paint Perle as a victim of his own good intentions, is pissed–off because Rose, being as stupid as every official and non-official suckling at the Bush administration’s teat, accidentally reveals through Perle’s own thoughts and words issues that are relevant to the American public that voters don’t apparently deserve to know when they are charged with deciding the nature of their own government and future.

Though un-elected, Perle’s job as a Defense Policy Advisor was NOT to promote the fanciful ideas of a sequestered club of pseudo intellectuals with a hard-on for war and imperial dominance, but to serve the citizens of the country. Instead he chose to be a player, to be active only to satisfy himself. And now in his complaints following this article he is still serving only himself.

It’s thanks to fuckers like him, who view everything through a self –referencing political lens that the US consistently engages in policies abroad that engenders the kind of hatred that leads to strangers from one side of the planet determined to kill other strangers from the other side of the planet. But it’s not the policy-makers who are driven to kill out of frustration to be heard and it’s not the policy-makers who get blown to bits as a result.

I’m so fucking mad at this fucking GIT and his fucking friends and the whole fucking lot of them that I can’t properly conclude this post.