As if things couldn't get any worse with the disastrous failure of their theories in Iraq, the neocons movements is imploding in a writhing convulsion of self-destruction. Pat Buchanan has written a scathing summary of their infighting, blame, and recrimination against each other. And Charles Kraut and Frank Fukuyama have started a public war over details in Fukuyama's latest book.
Oh, how I love it when Republicans start ripping each other to shreds. On March 25, 2006, Pat Buchanan asked Are the Neocons Losing It?
1. William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat."
2. Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong."
3. Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow."
4. Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."
5. Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."
But Pat Buchanan focuses most of his mockery for The March 20 Wall Street Journal article by Fred Barnes.
...the piece urges Bush to begin the "rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration."
The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil.
Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow -- and Vice President Richard Cheney.
"The trickiest issue is how to handle Karl Rove," says Barnes.
(also) ... Barnes urges Bush to appoint Condi vice president and "anoint" her as "presidential successor." Who would replace Condi at State? Pro-war liberal Joe Lieberman.
But Pat Buchanan's fantasy future gets even more entertaining. He images Richard Lugar and John McCain in a jealous rage, ridicules Condi Rice, and and foreshadows GOP infighting among for the a replacement for Dick Cheney as Vice President. Is this whole thing like a Democratic fantasy dream?
I should like to be in earshot when Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hears that he has been passed over for secretary of state by the junior Democratic senator from Connecticut.
All of Cheney's problems are tied to Iraq. But so are Bush and Condi tied to Iraq. Her failure at the National Security Council to screen the intelligence and ensure that Defense did due diligence for the occupation produced today's crisis. And what has Condi's crusade for democracy produced, other than historic gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas on the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Moqtada al Sadr and the Shia clerics in Iraq?
I'll say. Putting Rice directly in the line of succession to the Oval Office would detonate an explosion far more ruinous to Bush than the Dubai ports deal. It would instantly jump-start the presidential campaign of 2008. Conservatives who consider Condi weak on life and a pro-affirmative-action social liberal would start carving her up before she reached the Senate hearing room.
Would John McCain stand aside for Rice? Would George Allen? Would the evangelical Christians? All would move to block her. And no one would worry about any damage this would do to a George Bush who was so arrogant as to try to impose, as his choice for the 2008 nominee of the GOP, another ex-staffer and spinster like Harriet Miers.
But Pat Buchanan's best paragraph is his correct assessment that Bush's biggest problems are not his staff but his policies. And he can replace all the staff he want to but it will not help. Remember folks. Pat Buchanan is a hard right wing Republican.
That Bush is in trouble is undeniable. But his people are not Bush's problem. His policies are. It is these policies, not his advisers, that have given us huge deficits, 12 million illegal aliens, a trade deficit running at $800 billion a year and a no-win war that is bleeding our country.
Charles Krauthammer Goes Ballistic On Frank Fukuyama
Meanwhile in GOP Circus Tent Number 2, Charles Krauthammer today became indignant on Frank Fukuyama's description of the moment of truth that caused him to realize the error of his ways and renounce the Neocon theory he helped co-found. He said he sat in disbelief some years back as Charles Krauthammer described the his delusional fantasy of a wonderful success going on Iraq while any realist could see the Iraq War was a foolish tragedy getting steadily worse. This has Krauthammer spitting mad and attacking Fukuyama's credibility and book. Fukuyama's Fantasy
WASHINGTON -- It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as ``a virtually unqualified success.'' He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.
And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.
...
[but] I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama's claim that I attributed ``virtually unqualified success'' to the war is a fabrication.
Krauthammer goes on to encourage folks to check out a transcript of his speech at " the American Enterprise Institute under its title ``Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.'' (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/...)"
But Krauthammer says the jury is still out on success in Iraq.
We do not yet know. History will judge whether we can succeed in ``establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq.'' My point then, as now, has never been that success was either inevitable or at hand, only that success was critically important to ``change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.''
I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the enterprise: ``the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail.''
You see folks, even Krauthammer already noted then how "arrogant" the effort was. Giving him later distance. But his most scathing criticism is reserved for Fukuyama.
For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as ``a virtually unqualified success'' is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its assured success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the root causes of 9/11: ``the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world -- oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.''
Fukuyama's book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of 9/11 -- new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of ``soft power'' -- is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his sympathetic reviewer, concludes that ``neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all -- the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.''
Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq War before it was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin Stelzer, editor of ``The Neocon Reader,'' for such an inveterate pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against it. He has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has no right to change what I said.
Well folks, what else can aspiring progressive pundints say to discredit these folks? When they do such an excellent job ripping themselves about, it sort of takes the challenge and fun out of it for folks like me.
Oh well, whatever...
As long as the job gets done.