Neocons turn on Bush for incompetence over Iraq war - Guardian

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George W. Bush has been carrying their water for these people for six years, but now that he's in trouble they are the first to desert his sinking ship. DS

Abstract: Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting. Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war, Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article that could influence Tuesday's battle for the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election.(...) Kenneth Adelman, another Reagan era hawk who sat on the Defence Policy Board until last year, drew attention with a 2002 commentary in the Washington Post predicting that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk". He now says he hugely overestimated the abilities of the Bush team. "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent," Mr Adelman said. "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."(...) Mr Adelman said the guiding principle behind neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world", had been killed off for a generation at least. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell". Michael Rubin, who worked on the staff of the Pentagon's office of special plans and the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad, accused Mr Bush of betraying Iraqi reformers. The president's actions, Mr Rubin said, had been "not much different from what his father did on February 15 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did". READ MORE