The Guardian reports: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, a member of the influential Defence Policy Board that
advised the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in the run-up to the
war, is as outspoken in denouncing the conduct of the war as he was
once bullish on the invasion. He blamed "dysfunction" in the Bush
administration for the present quagmire.
"The decisions did not
get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely
fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly," Mr Perle told
Vanity Fair, according to early excerpts of the article. "At the end of
the day, you have to hold the president responsible."
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."
David Frum, who as a White House speechwriter helped coin the phrase "axis of
evil" in 2002, said failure in Iraq might be inescapable, because "the
insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United
States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them".
The blame, Mr Frum said, lies with "failure at the centre", beginning
with the president.
