The Neo-con artists no longer trust their Bush

I would not deign to predict what's going to happen in the election later today, but if the American people have any self-respect they will vote the Iraq war-bums out. But whatever happens I think the Dick, the Bush and their administration have pretty much met their Waterloo.

When the very ideological architects of the Iraq war jump ship, blaming the captain as it hits the iceberg, what else needs to be said.

First it was Francis Fukuyama who led the way with America at the Crossroads. In a concurrent NYT article he said:

"As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."

Now as the Bush/Iraq war ship is sinking further and further into the sledge, several more neocon artists are trying to abandon it. Blame the captain! Blame the captain! They yell.

Now Vanity Fair's David Rose in an appropriately titled article - Neo Culpa - reports that

"As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself."

Even Richard Perle, the "Prince of Darkness" himself, has this to say about the decision to invade Iraq:

"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' Â… I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

That, of course, is a complete reversal of what the Neocons said at the time. It is also a complete rejection of what almost all Republicans and some Democrats continue to stand by.