Rats Jumping Ship?

This Vanity Fair piece (here) about neocon recriminations over Iraq is disgusting. The piece runs quotes in which all the big neocons who supported the liberation of Iraq and the Bush Administration's war strategy to attack terrorism by pushing democratic regime change turn on the President. The story will be told in full in January's edition but the magazine has published a preview. Just in time for the November midterm election. What an odd coincidence.

The preview presents quote after quote from prominent neocons all turning on the President or his Iraq policy. It's a shameless display of rats seeking to protect their personal reputations. In their defense several of the neocons quoted in the piece claim that Vanity Fair is distorting their positions. (Here.) Let's hope so.

America is passing through one of the most difficult periods in its history. The threat from Islamist Jihadism is real yet many discount the threat. The President and his neocon supporters saw that threat more plainly than many and pushed an aggressive strategy to fight it.

This war is a contest of wills. The side that loses the will to fight first will be the side that loses. The Democrats have lacked the will for a long time now. Many Americans in the middle are losing the will. The midterm elections will show that. Now if even the architects of America's war policy lack the will to stick it out for the long haul, we've lost already and we might as well bring all of our soldiers home now. And God help the brave Iraqis - Kurds and Arabs alike, Afghans, and Kuwaitis who counted on us for help. The most dangerous thing to be in this world is an ally of the United States.

As Michael Rubin says in his own defense:

" ... I am a Republican, but whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power, Washington’s word must mean something. Leadership is about responsibility, not just politics. We cannot go around the world betraying our allies — in this case Iraqis who believed in us or allied with us — just because of short-term political expediency. This is not just about Iraq: If we abandon Iraq, we will not only prove correct all of Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric about the US being a paper tiger, but we will also demonstrate — as James Baker and George H. W. Bush did in 1991 — that listening to the White House and alliance with the United States is a fool’s decision. We can expect no allies anywhere, be they in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, if we continue to sacrifice principles to short-term realist calculations. It’s not enough to have an attention span of two years, when the rest of the world thinks in decades if not centuries."

-tdr

Technorati: Iraq, War, Bush, Terrorism, Neocons.