Tuesday, May 04, 2004
The Fall of the Neocons (or Mmmm .... Schadenfreude)
Yes I know this is all over the place, but go read the definitive article on the break between Chalabi and the neoconservatives. It includes this priceless quote from L. Marc Zell, a partner in the law firm Douglas Feith left for his undersecretary of defense for policy gig.
Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat. He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another
The treachery and turncoatedness that Zell is talking about refers, of course, to Israel. The neoconservatives are now realizing that Chalabi isn't as interested in buttressing Israel's position in the Mideast as he always said he was. Gee, who could have guessed that? It turns out, see, Ahmed was really just interested in gaining power for himself, and is now playing up his Shia roots and cozying up to Iran, Israel's most powerful enemy.
Also according to the Salon article, Feith is definitely out, Wolfowitz is probably going , ... and the Wolfowitz axing was decreed personally by Fat Karl:
As the intellectual architects of an "easy" war gone bad, [the neoconservatives] stand to pay the price. The first to go may be Zell's old partner Douglas Feith. Military sources say Feith will resign his Defense Department post by mid-May. His removal was reportedly a precondition imposed by Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte when he agreed to take over from Paul Bremer as the top U.S. official in Iraq. "Feith is on the way out," Iraqi defense minister (and Chalabi nephew) Ali Allawi says confidently, and other sources confirm it. Feith's boss, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, may follow. Bush political mastermind Karl Rove is said to be determined that Wolfowitz move on before the November election, even if he comes back in a second Bush term. Sources say one of the positions being suggested is the director of Central Intelligence.
I wonder if Richard Perle and David Frum stand by the following assertion from their magnum opus An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which came out four short months ago:
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to let the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad
Somebody should ask them ...
