The neo-conservatives who helped convince President George W. Bush that the US military could be used to spread democracy are now lashing out at what they see as the incompetent way the Bush administration has fought the Iraq War.
I heard this story on the morning news. I can’t say I was at all surprised, at least not that the Neo-Con dream of a Pax-Americana turned out to be a nightmare. I am surprised though that the architects of the Iraq Invasion, the people who first pushed and petitioned for the seeding of American-style democracy through armed regime change should turn on the person they deliberately setup as their scape goat so quickly after the Republican stranglehold of that very same American democracy at home was broken.
Take a run through the list of associates, so-called scholars and fellows attached to conservative think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century to mention just two of the collectives of bottom-feeders associated with this supposed new way. The Neo-Conservative push to take America back to what she’d been during the Cold War. An overtly aggressive, domineering, militaristically hegemonic nation with designs of the position of global policeman and general law-maker for the world. In 2003, she was accurately labelled the Arrogant Empire. Fairly apt title. Read through the lists of people associated with this movement and you’ll find the very same people now distancing themselves at a rapid clip from the crippled Bush administration and it’s quagmire war in Iraq which they’re claiming is all the President’s fault.
Read the letters to people in positions of power at the time of writing, regarding Iraq and the Middle East. Read the clamour for havoc. Read the names of those urged on that clamour. The very same people who have now either fallen from grace or who, like the Biblical disciple Peter at Christ s crucifixition, claim no involvement with the man at the top. “It was all Dubya’s doing, honest!”
William Kristol; Richard V. Allen; Daniel Blumenthal; Aaron Friedberg; Francis Fukuyama; Frank Gaffney; Donald Kagan; Robert Kagan; Richard Perle; Gary Schmitt; William Schneider, Jr.; Richard H. Shultz; R. James Woolsey; I. Lewis Libby; Dan Quayle; Donald Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz; Dick Cheney; Jeb Bush and there are many, many others who now no longer sign letters to the President, the house speaker or other luminaries. In fact, on the PNAC site, there haven’t been any letters or statements issued since January 2005. Right around the time things really started going to shit in Iraq. Funny that.
Thankfully, grandiose dreams of Pax-Americana, democratic regime change for the middle east spawned through militaristic invasions have died, along with the almost 2,900 American lives lost in Iraq since March 2003. It’s over. The Neo-Con disaster is over. Now it’s down to the rational thinkers in global politics to help pick up the pieces. Hopefully, change will soon come to Australia. Election 2007 will show us whether or not we too are tired of the conservative nightmare.
They say there’s no honour among thieves. There’s also the saying about lying with dogs and waking with fleas. I reckon we’re all tired of scratching.