The neoconservatives whom they followed blindly into waging the disastrous war to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq are turning on them and claiming that the hideous mess which Iraq has become is all Bush and Rumsfeld's fault. So it is, but that is only because Bush and Rumsfeld listened to and – far worse - empowered the neocons in the first place.
Douglas Feith, former Number Three at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld as under Secretary of defense for Policy Planning – has just published a new book of memoirs called "War and Decision" and his old friend and colleague former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz turned up at Washington's think tanks over the past week to endorse his old colleague's book with supposed statesmanlike dignity.
"Yeah, we were clueless on counterinsurgency," Wolfowitz admitted Monday. "No one anticipated this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it started."
But of course, not everyone was clueless about the Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq. A number of people in government as well as at least four analysts at our sister company United Press International continually warned about the seriousness of the insurgency from the very beginning and accurately predicted its development over the following five years.
Neither Wolfowitz nor Feith, nor Bush or Rumsfeld, of course, heeded those, or any other, words of warning. Indeed, the current U.S. drive against Muqtada al-Sadr and his Shiite Mehdi Army in Iraq suggests that even without Wolfowitz and Feith egging him on, Bush has still not lost his taste for charging blindly and recklessly ahead into highly dangerous conflicts that can quickly escalate beyond his control or expectations.
The network of neocon opinion-shapers in the U.S. media all remain exactly where they were before the catastrophic Iraq adventure was launched. Not one of them has been called to account for the catastrophic decisions they urged that have so far cost the lives of at least 4,000 American soldiers and probably well in excess of 150,000 Iraqis.
On the contrary, Sen. John McCain, the Republican frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination and an increasingly likely figure to win the presidency in the November 2008 U.S. election continues to revere Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the neocons, as his main foreign policy guru.
Wolfowitz's no doubt inadvertent admission of his own incompetence is important and welcome. But it looks unlikely to teach caution and needed restraint to either the current White House incumbent or his putative republican successor. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.