Vanity Fair talks to the neoconservative intellectuals who goaded the nation into invading Iraq and finds that they are, unsurprisingly, aghast and pointing fingers. Mostly, the fingers point at the incompetence of the Bush administration. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,” says Kenneth “it’s going to be a cakewalk” Adelman. “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.”
“The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless,” Adelman says.
Here’s the problem with that: In the real world of international affairs, there is never an opportunity to disentangle the essential from the circumstantial. Circumstance rules. Execution is everything. Otherwise, we’d all just sit around, wish for world peace and goodwill towards all men, and wait for the happy result to unfold.
If you start with the assumption that anything is possible and everything will go right, it doesn’t matter what you advocate — the entire conversation is preposterous. It’s like saying, “I support the policy of regime change in North Korea by beaming our new mind-control weapon at the dictator’s head and making him abdicate.” A noble and beneficial idea — “but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, you’ve got to grapple with the world you have, not the world you want.
Nearly every single one of us who argued before the war that it was a mistake to invade Iraq agreed that Saddam Hussein was an awful dictator who, in the abstract, one would wish gone. But invading Iraq to overthrow him carried mad risks — risks that we have now seen play out in their near-worst scenarios.
Balancing judgments of risks against desired goals is the very essence of foreign policymaking. The neocons are eager to blame Bush administration competence, and they’re right, but it doesn’t get them off the hook. In their own foreign-policy field, the neocons — based, now, on their own testimony — have now definitively proven their own incompetence. It is time, really, for them to stop pontificating and go away.
[tags]vanity fair, neocons, neoconservatives, iraq, bush administration[/tags]
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