No Remorse -- The War Cheerleaders Reconsider Iraq

By Colman McCarthy

Four years after mongering for the war in Iraq, and seeing their simplistic fantasies of exporting their version of democracy to Iraq come to nothing, neocon intellectuals are now scorning the Bush team for Mission Unaccomplished--and at the same time absolving themselves of revving for war.

For a model of shamelessness, consider Kenneth Adelman. He is the self-promoting Bush insider who confidently predicted in 2003 that the conquering of Iraq will be “a cakewalk.” In multiple forums, Adelman is now criticizing the Bush-Cheny-Rumsfeld bloc for botching the war. It “didn’t have to be managed this bad,” he told The Washington Post. “It’s just awful.”

Indeed. It’s awful that Adelman will not be hailed as a visionary who helped save Iraq via “regime change.” It’s awful that Adelman suffered the indignity of being booted off the Defense Policy Board by Rumsfeld. It’s awful that Adelman’s cake fell flat. How much pain can one mortal endure.

Pardon the ridicule. But it’s a fit response for a shifty character who was long known in Washington for his toadying toil for patrons such as Rumsfeld and Cheney. Now he’s bailing. Lost in all in his gab about mismanagement are any serious expressions of remorse that the war he promoted has led to unspeakable misery for millions of Iraqis—the daily gore, the exodus of the frightened, the piling of bodies in morgues. —and for tens of thousands of American soldiers killed or wounded. No regrets, either, for hailing Bush the cowboy when he said of the insurgents, “bring ‘em on.”

The unapologetic Adelman isn’t the only one walking away and sticking it to the president. There is Richard Perl, an avid booster of the war when he led the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, and another one who made sure he avoided military combat. There are hawks in Congress who funded the war, plus the retired generals who take to CNN to tell us how the fight went wrong. Much of the American media—the cozily embedded ones of 2003—have gone from cheering to jeering.

No one should doubt that the lives of Adelman, Perl and the rest will happily go on, untroubled by guilt and unwilling to have the decency to shut up while the debacle in Iraq worsens. Rightwing think tanks have ample office space for them, there to be well-paid for instructing the public on the nuances of foreign policy.

That those who plop behind desks to promote war suffer no consequences when the war sours is not new to Iraq. More than 20 years after he returned from combat in Vietnam, W. D. Ehrhart wrote in The Philadephia Inquirer (July 4, 1989) about Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger and other architects of the Johnson-Nixon war: “Not once in all these years have I ever heard a single high-level policymaker of the Vietnam War apologize for what he did, ever admit that he made a mistake, ever show the slightest sign of remorse for all the havoc and misery, the shattered lives and shattered families and shattered nations left gasping in the wake of his decisions.

“I have often wondered how these men lives with themselves. How do they get up each day and look themselves in the eye?...Or are there private doubts, private demons, that they are simply too proud or too ashamed to admit?”

Now it’s the turn of Iraq’s veterans to do the wondering.