The NY Times Op-Ed Page: Neo-con Central

My head hurts.  Today's NY Times Week in Review has a distinguished symposium titled How to See This Mission Accomplished.

Wow, I thought naively.  A diverse group of opinions on what to do about Iraq on the fifth anniversary of the most shameful, bitterly ironic "celebration" in US military history.

Then I looked at the distinguished conspirators [oh, I mean contributors]: Fred Kagan, Daniel Perle, Danielle Pletka, Ken Pollack, Paul fucking Bremer, for chrissake!  Yes, NY Times.  The Mission will finally be "accomplished" by taking the advice of the rogues and criminals who engineered the initial "Mission Accomplished."

Not a single "dirty fucking hippie" [n. phrase: someone who had the sense to oppose the war before it started] (unless you consider Nathaniel Fick, a Marine infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to perhaps be a dirty fucking hippie).

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In fact, these were the very same people gathered in March for the anniversary of the beginning of the war that they started -- the "experts on military affairs" and the "very serious" people gathered for this occasion.  The introduction solemnly intones:

For the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military affairs to identify a significant challenge facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.

I guess Al Gore, Howard Dean, Morton Halperin, Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, Mohamed El Baradei and a couple of hundred others were busy.