The Rats Deserting the Ship?

Just how bad have things gotten for George W? Now Richard Perle and Ken Adelman are going public with their strenuous criticism of the administration’s handling of Iraq. You remember Richard and Ken, don’t you? Perle was the author of the January 26,1998 PNAC letter to President Clinton castigating the President for failing to take a harder line with Hussein and later a principle author of the Rumseld strategy for deposing Hussein and inserting a democratically-elected government in Baghdad.

Ken Adelman not only joined Perle, Rumseld, Cheney and Scooter Libby as signatories to the PNAC mission, but joined the likes of Joe Lieberman and other conservative luminaries in revitalizing the Committee on the Present Danger (see my prior posting, “Don and Dick’s Excellent Adventure” and "What's Driving Senator Joe?"). Still don’t remember Ken? He was the author of the February 2002 Washington Post op ed piece which vigorously took issue with those who raised alarm about the Rumsfeld plan for invading and occupying Iraq (the small matter of troop numbers, for example) with the dismissive retort: “I believe that demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk … This President Bush does not need to amass rinky-dink nations as ‘coalition partners' to convince the Washington establishment that we're right”. Mr. Adelman was not simply commenting in the abstract. He was, in fact, a participant with Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumseld and Cheney in the development of the plan to “liberate” Iraq.

Now both Perle and Adelman say that dysfunction within the the Bush administration has rendered the Iraq policy a disaster. In an upcoming interview in Vanity Fair, Perle tells the interviewer that he would have considered other strategies for dealing with Hussein had he known how poorly Bush et al were to handle the effort to change the Hussein regime. Moreover, Perle lays blame squarely on Bush’s shoulders saying that W has to be held responsible for failing to understand and recognize that the strategy was poorly conceived and poorly executed. For his part, Adelman concedes that his “cakewalk” commentary was mistaken.

Said Adelman: "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he said. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Do you think they make life vests small enough for these rats and will there be enough to go around for all those to follow? Inquiring minds want to know.