Embarrassed, I would guess. Since they all stuck their necks out on Fox News and confidently predicted the exact opposite of what actually happened?
A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other wooly-headed war theoretician, Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa.
Unlike the Powell maxim "If you break it, you own it," the Wolfowitz philosophy is "If you break it, walk away from it."
Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war? The neoconservatives have moved on to debates about China and Iran. Richard Perle has dropped out of sight, except to pop up, as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual meeting in May, to urge a military raid on Iran if it's "on the verge of a nuclear weapon."
This is brilliant piece. But I will add a question too. Where is Ken Edelmann? You remember, "Cakewalk" Ken Edelman of the Neocon publishng empire? Notice they only appear at the Heritage Foundation meetings. Of course, the last people left on Earth who truly think the Iraq invasion was a gift to the Iraqis.
Though the Bushie gang has maintained that it would be hard for Al Qaeda to operate on the run, General Abizaid noted that the group is "empowered by modern communications, expertly using the virtual world for planning, recruiting, fund-raising, indoctrination and exploiting the mass media" to break the U.S. will and try to form a haven in Iraq.
Al Qaeda is exploiting tribal tensions intensified by the bungled U.S. occupation. Mr. Wolfowitz's assumption that America could conquer Baghdad and install the Shiites at the expense of the Sunnis, with bouquets thrown, in a religious war that has been going on for centuries, was naïve and dangerous.
The rest of us may be glued to the gruesome pileup of bodies in Iraq, but Wolfie has moved on. He told The Financial Times that he still thought the U.S. and the British did "the right thing" for "the right reasons," and "hopefully, it's going to turn out the right way."
He said that wherever he travels, from Burkina Faso to Bosnia, Iraq rarely comes up. How fortunate for him.
But this is circular logic that we can't wait around to oppose. This is the right wing punditocracy's biggest disservice to Americans: telling us now that if we stop doing what's not working, then we'll lose.
Before Mr. Bush was dragged out of Crawford this summer, he was making the case that we had to keep killing in Iraq to honor troops killed there. This week, Gen. Richard Myers offered more circular logic, warning that a U.S. defeat would invite another 9/11. The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and now says it can't leave for fear of spurring another 9/11.
Wolfie and fellow hawks turned Iraq into a harbor for Al Qaeda with an invasion they justified by falsely calling Iraq a harbor for Al Qaeda. General Myers said that America couldn't leave and allow Al Qaeda to dominate Iraq because "then in my view we would have lost, and the next 9/11 would be right around the corner, absolutely."