The Death of Neoconservatism?

Oh, and if you really think I'm fairly reasonable, my estimation of you just slipped a few notches ...

 

The private intelligence community -- the one run out of Cheney's OVP by the PNAC crowd -- was wrong about Iraq because they, like the Pod, have been wrong about everything going back to the days when they put together Team B to lie about the imminent threat of the crumbling USSR. They then moved on to "rogue states," ignoring stateless terrorism until 9/11, when theyinvented a new "Stalinist" tyranny to rail against. They are wrong because they're always wrong.
And the Pod is one of Rudy!'s main foreign policy gurus.
Nice.

 

That's the Blessed Saint Rudy of 9/11 to you, mister.

 

Mea culpa.
Doesd that make Judi! The Venerable Judith Of The Hamptons?

 

I wonder if Norman was wearing his tinfoil hat when he wrote this.

Some of the comments attached to his, um, opinion piece are interesting:

It is my gut impression that the NIE is staffed by “elites” who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other so-called universities of distinction. These people are very dangerous. A very high percentage of them, maybe even the majority, embrace a deceitful pacifism. They are utopians that believe on a subconscious level, if not even consciously, military action almost always causes more harm than good. This is especially true if those who threaten America possess dark skin. In that case, they are victims of our alleged imperialist policies. Everything will work out fine if we were only nicer to them. These folks would feel quite comfortable with the 1933 Oxford Union resolution declaring, “This House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.”

The damn pointyheads are out to destroy The Republic.

 

Fucking madmen.

 

Watch your blood pressure.

 

Jesus, when are people going to stop listening to the likes of Norman Podhoretz? The man's been a public loon, and wrong about everything, since about 1978. How many times do you get to be wrong -- factually, empirically. demonstrably wrong -- before you become unemployable in your field?
Goddamn.

 

Norm played the Nazi card? How out of character.

As to educational background: Wolfowitz -- Cornell; Perle -- Princeton; Feith -- Harvard; Even Bill Kristol -- Harvard.

 

What says that the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq? The reality is that much of the intelligence we based the decision to go to war with was wrong. The intelligence that implied going to war was a bad idea was ignored. The intelligence sending us to war, evidence says, came from that crook Chalabi instead of sources that should be trusted.

It is possible that the information is wrong. The person that was in charge of this for the CIA was outed as a covert operative and no longer is employed.

 

Indeed. Neoconservatism is the poster child for ivory tower intellectualism. All ideas, no pragmatism, no sense for what's actually happening on the ground. For these people to be decrying the influence of "elites" would be like Wal-Mart's CEO lamenting the decline of the mom-n-pop retail store.

 

A somewhat prominent neocon, a very nice guy, lives a few houses down from my parents and is a family friend. In late 2002/early 2003 I remember him telling me that Hans Blix and his team had all been bribed by Saddam Hussein. I also remember him telling me in the weeks after the April 2003 invasion of Iraq that all of Saddam's WMDs had been moved to Syria.

Neocons have been wrong at every turn in the last five years. Some of them are very smart, but they almost seem to have lost their minds grasping for answers when things have gone wrong in the last five years. They have no credibility at this point. And I'm a fairly conservative guy.