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Thursday, December 14. 2006
A Friend Like Ken
The guilty ones: The President, Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice
Ken Adelman, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and John Bolton
Ken Adelman, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and John Bolton
Am I the only one offended by Ken Adelman getting quoted and interviewed everyday on television as an “expert” on the war in Iraq and how it’s going all wrong — when he was one of the chief architects who planned and instigated this immoral debacle?
Adelman, for those who might not know, is the guy, while employed at the Pentagon as a chief advisor to Donald Rumsfeld, told America, in February, 2002, “Demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”
When he was on Hardball with Chris Matthews in 2003, he derided critics of the war — who were predicting the very situation we find our military trapped in now — calling the critics, “…chicken littles, running around and saying ‘oh my God, it’s terrible.’ ”
Worse yet, Not CNN, not MSNBC, none of the networks that have him as a guest question his hypocrisy. Talk about the news media failing to perform their jobs.
Ken Adelman has a long neocon history, nearly as long as those of Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. It started with the Commerce Department in the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969 under President Richard Nixon. In 1975 he was appointed to the position of Assistant to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for two years during the Gerald Ford Administration. During the Reagan years, he was the Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations behind Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
As is the prerequisite of the neocons in the White House and Pentagon, Adelman is a member of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon group that began pushing for the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein back in 1998.
He was a chief architect of this tragedy. The fact that he is now denouncing this war is preposterous. He gave a mea culpa by way of Vanity Fair magazine, in which he denounced his old friend Rumsfeld and admitted he shouldn’t have endorsed going to war:
“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,”
"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."
When asked whether he would have endorsed the decision to invade Iraq if he knew we would be at this place in history today, he answered: “I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked ‘can’t do’. And that’s very different from ‘let’s go’.”
Ya think?
Now, that he and his neocon buddies Richard Perle, David Frum and Michael Rubin have all “recanted” their support for this war and this president, they should get a pass for having planned it and pushed to get it started? No way! Hold Adelman and every other member of Bush 43’s Defense Policy Board accountable for this debacle.
And here’s a question begging to be asked: Why did you wait until President Bush’s popularity numbers were at historic lows in the polls? What, were you waiting for — hoping for — things to reverse course in Iraq so you could jump on that bandwagon? And people tell me I’m cynical.
There’s nothing more that needs to be said. As these neocon cowards come crawling back to the American view — their tails between their legs — intent on regaining favor with the American public with their appearances on television, they should be eviscerated publicly, exposed for the ratbastards they are for having started this war.
Yes, Adelman is right when he says the president is ultimately responsible, but it was the collection of neocon advisors in the Defense Policy Board and elsewhere who pushed for this war, waiting for their “Pearl Harbor Moment” when they could justify, by whatever deception necessary, the regime change everyone else was convinced would ultimately end with our troops in another Vietnam.
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