The Rats Are Jumping Ship

We hear from Vanity Fair that things are getting so bad around the Administration that even the former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Richard Perle and former Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman are jumping ship. And in the process of using those handy lifeboats, are not thinking twice about pointing the finger of blame squarely at George Bush. they blame the "dysfunctional" Bush administration for the "disaster" in Iraq and say that if they had it to do over again they would not advocate an invasion of Iraq. I find it quite telling however that none of the blame seems to be pointed in their own direction for their obsessiveness and fanatacism toward the mid-east. Perle tells Vanity Fair that, "at the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.... [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him." Adelman tells Vanity Fair that when he wrote in 2002 that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," he "just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Adelman also tells Vanity Fair that "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." Of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whom Adelman says he is "very, very fond of," he admits, "I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me." Adelman adds that he "checked out" of this administration the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former C.I.A. director George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer--"three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots." What these joker don't get, is that fact it isn't usually the implementation of the plan that is the failure, it is the plan itself. I repeat for what has to be the millionth time "stay the course" is not a plan it's a slogan. Get wigh it Geoge before the November body count doesn't set yet another record of deaths.