Neo Culpa?

The Neo-Cons have it right – the war in

Iraq was corrupt, profiteering and immoral.

Like Ba’athists from a collapsing regime, America’s neo-con glitterati are turning their backs on the Bush presidency – once their own - faster than Nancy Pelosi can say subpoena.

This December, David Rose will publish his exclusive interviews with leading neo-cons in Vanity Fair – already a cause of controversy; the Neo-Cons have bitten back with a hastily cobbled together riposte in today’s National Review after quotes were released by Rose yesterday.
Hasty and heated the Neo-Cons retorts may be, but disavowals of their comments they are not. Richard Perle, prince of darkness, and Neo-Conservative ideologue par excellence, indeed, left little ambiguity in his criticism of the war:

“Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not
made by Neo-Conservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and
certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in
Baghdad.”

Perle’s comments seem to be the Neo-Con thinking du jour. David Frum, the speechwriter who invented the “axis of evil” for the President’s 2002 State of the Union address, tells Rose that the Iraqi disaster lies with “failure at the centre.”

If Frum is equivocal, Perle is not. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the President responsible.” Fellow Neo-Con and co-conspirator in the Centre for Security cabal, Kenneth Adelman – who supposed in 2002 that the liberation of Iraq would be “a cakewalk” – shares Perle’s sentiments.

“The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was that Bush
gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former CIA director] George Tenet,
General Tommy Franks and [former Coalition Provisional Authority Chief] Paul
Bremer – three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key
spots….those three are directly responsible for the disaster in Iraq.”

It is what, Paul Krugman in his New York Times this week termed, ‘the FEMAfication of the federal government’ – executive departments stacked, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the eve of Katrina, with ill-suited and under qualified lackeys.

The Neo-Cons are, of course, right. The war in Iraq, nay - the Bush administration writ large, is corrupt, nepotistic and rotten to its core.

In Iraq, the facts are already well known.

Witness: Dick Cheyney’s former company, Halliburton has to date been awarded $600 million in non-competitive reconstruction contracts (of which just 90% has been spent on oil infrastructure and American military needs), while the Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown and Root, has been given all but monopoly control over Iraq’s oil – an operation worth $7 billion to the company, again awarded in non-competative contracts.

Bechtel, another corporate giant, has around $100 billion of Iraqi contracts (all non-competative) in the proverbial pipeline. Between 1999 and the start of the Iraq war, Bechtel donated over $1.3 million dollars to the republican campaign chest. Meanwhile, Bechtel has former board members, former and current VPs and Presidents, the current CEO, and “friends” with seats in the President’s Export Council, the Defense Policy Board, Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, USAID, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Export-Import Bank, the CIA, OSHA, and the Department of Energy Evaluation Board. Most notably, Paul Bremer, the former Coalition Provisional Authority Chief, was a Bechtel director.

Meanwhile, the UN now reports that 1 in 5 Iraq’s live in chronic poverty. From the story of the Bechtel ‘rebuilt’ school overflowing with raw sewage and in ruins, to the Iraqi Halliburton employees receiving just a tenth of their allotted wages, the reports of mismanagement and corruption are rife.

Even a dyed in the wool republican like John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admits the US must consider a “change of course” (translation, run fast, run swift). So while Bush was last week “pleased with the progress we’re making”, his Neo-Con friends, aren’t seeing things quite so rosily.

By their own yardstick, the Neo-Conservative war in Iraq has failed. “A tough foreign policy on behalf of morality”, to crib Kenneth Adelman, Iraq is not.

However, morality, conservative or otherwise, has little to do with the bungled postwar situation. The fault does not just lie, as Adelman, Perle et al would like to suggest, with all the President’s men but with the war itself.

For all their high handed words on staying the course, flying true red, Neo-Con straight and dropping justice and Freedom on Iraq like a beautiful dollar green smart bomb, Bush’s new neo-con critics got what they asked for. Diligently and with singular vision did the reconstructors of Iraq apply their Neo-Con principles: Pre-emptive military action to secure Iraq as a democratic state, an economic free market whose trade and capital would wash over the Islamic world like a wonderful cosmetic ablution and the demise of an anti-American, brutal regime to boot. American economic assets secured, American jobs created, oil pumped and the threat of Islamism in a world heading slowly, inexorably, progressively to liberal bliss, reduced.

The problems in Iraq; the chaos and the bloodshed, are not the byproducts of a venal and incompetent few, but actually the necessary effects of a war conjured to do one thing: To advance an agenda only ever strictly American – an agenda based on a perversion of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ bent to fit the rule of economic liberalization and curbing of Islamism and anti-American ideologies in the region. It is a policy breathtaking in its historical naivety and political arrogance and it is Neo-Conservative to the core.

The Neo-Con deserters have got one thing wrong; they’re just as culpable for the war in Iraq’s failure as the Bush administration. Their venture into Iraq didn’t go wrong, it was wrong from the start, the Bush administration has just made it worse.