For Pat Buchanan to blame the neocons for the failure in Iraq ignores the fact that the man most responsible for the failure, Donald Rumsfeld, has more in common with Buchanan than he does with Bill Kristol. (One prominent neoconservative, however, Paul Wolfowitz, did sign on enthusiastically to Rumsfeld's agenda.) Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Buchanan & Rummy
I have read Alan Wolfe's lengthy article from the Washington Monthy about conservative governance, and there is plenty of good stuff in it. But why does he drop bizarre statements like this?:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Rumsfeld will always be a confusional figure because he's not a neocon (he served on Rockford Institue's board at point I think) and I wasn't opposed to transforming the military out of its Cold War mentality (times do change). Rumsfeld problem is that he never told the neocons on his staff we're not going to fight the kind of war you that you want with what we're doing to transform the military. He let Cheney, Wolfowitz and Feith set the policy but didn't supply the muscle needed for that policy (and vise-versa, many neocons should have been calling for Rumsfeld's head instead of backing him up. They'll pay dearly for that error.)I like Wolfe's line "a Scoop Jackson foreign policy with a Robert Taft military." And even that line is somewhat disengenuous. Anytime there is a war, you never want to fight it on the cheap. You want to marshal together the most powerful force possible. But you want to make it so you don't have to fight unless absolutly necessary. That didn't happen in this case either. The neocons goaded Rumsfeld into wanting war with Iraq before the new military was in place. His incompetence and arrogance and meglomania will be what's remembered of him.
Say Clark, did you check my response to Wolfe on my blog? What did you think of it?
Post a Comment