1 Boring Old Man

Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

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Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton’s tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush’s strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country’s at stake. A region’s at stake. This is a gigantic situation… This didn’t have to be managed this bad [ly]. It’s just awful."

Adelman is well known for a pair of editorial columns regarding the Iraq War he wrote for the Washington Post in February 2002 and April 2003 entitled respectively "Cakewalk In Iraq" and "‘Cakewalk’ Revisited". In the first he argued that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would be a simple matter to accomplish: "I believe that demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." In the later editorial, published just a few weeks after the invasion, he claimed his vindication and in particular praised key Bush administration players: "My confidence 14 months ago sprang from having worked for Don Rumsfeld three times — knowing he would fashion a most creative and detailed war plan — and from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz well for many years."

Also notable are Adelman’s predictions regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Adelman said that weapons were likely to be near Tikrit and Baghdad, "because they’re the most protected places with the best troops. I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."

So now, when an article like this talks about Bush’s friends jumping off the ship, I want to scream, "Why did they support this war in the first place?" – particularly Neoconservatives like Kenneth Adleman. After five plus years of listening to what Maureen Dowd called "macho politics from marshmellow men," people are finally getting disillusioned. This illusion was transparent from the start. Slick talkers like Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Adleman are saying it was Bush’s execution of the war that was the problem. It was a lot more than that. It was the whole idea of this war that was the problem from the start, hatched in Newt’s own Ivory Tower, The American Enterprise Institute, and Adleman’s, Project for the New American Century.

The American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century [now morphed to the reincarnated Committee for the Present Danger] are who we should have gone to war with in 2002. How the Religious Right ever fell for this neofascist malarky will forever baffle me. And worse, how they fell for it in 2004 again, after it had become so crystal clear. I guess it comes down to nothing more complicated than the corrupting allure of Power…