Well the Neo-cons are under siege, playing the race card, and launching a rear guard attack against
Shrub to deflect responsibility -
Defaming his Intelligence and Indicting him as a Failure-"another Carter". Well at least they didn't call him crazy.
June 10, 2004
WASHINGTON -- As U.S. tanks surrounded Baghdad 14 months ago, an ardent group of war supporters in Washington toasted the success of an invasion they had done much to inspire.
Today, that same group, the neoconservatives, is itself under siege.
Since then, Adelman ["It'll be a Cake-walk"] acknowledged, the group's influence has declined, because "Iraq didn't turn out to be as promising as it was billed."
Other neocons worry that the real trouble for them could begin if President Bush is not reelected and, among conservatives, the finger-pointing begins -- in their direction.
"Bush could end up looking like the worst president since Jimmy Carter because of Iraq, and people are going to say, 'You got us into this mess,' " said one Washington source who considered himself a neoconservative and spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's going to be nasty and bitter and brutal."
One group of neoconservatives, Richard Perle, was unhappy that the White House didn't move more quickly to turn sovereignty over to Iraqis and put the country in control of dissidents such as Chalabi.
Other neocons, including William Kristol, contended that the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had allowed security problems to spread by deploying too few troops.
In general, neocons felt as if "they had created a brilliant screenplay, and it had fallen into the hands of the wrong director," said one self-described neoconservative.
An antiwar group in Brussels created a shadow international tribunal that convicted the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank founded by Kristol, for war crimes.
"It's not fun to be accused of war crimes," said Gary Schmitt, the center's executive director.
Some neoconservatives see an element of anti-Semitism among their critics, because many prominent adherents are Jewish. Neocons also discount views that they are a "cabal" that wields improper influence over the administration.
"It's very popular in Washington to believe that the president's mind is an empty vessel that's been filled by an unholy cabal," said Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank associated with neoconservatism.
Feith, the No. 3 Pentagon official, has been struggling to put to rest what he regards as unfair charges that he was trying to create a separate intelligence network in the Pentagon to guide administration decisions, and that he was an "intimate" of Chalabi. Feith met with Chalabi fewer than 10 times, said a spokesman.
The War Between the Snakes: Chicken Hawk against Chicken Hawk