> [I love the line about these neoimperial fantasists "cutting their
> teeth in Bosnia."]
>
> Hitchens Manning Iraq Barricades
> In Siege At Home
>
> By Sheelah Kolhatkar
>
> "there is a very deep reluctance to recant the war,
> because it involves facing up to some very tough intellectual
> choices,"
>
> <http://www.observer.com/pageone_newsstory1.asp>
>
Aug 23 2005
Memo To: Bill Kristol & Friends From: Jude Wanniski Re: You Got Us Into the War, No? http://wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=4589 At some point, Bill, aren`t you going to have to look back and say you really goofed, in the myriad articles you wrote in your Weekly Standard, promoting the war in Iraq? You must have seen the most recent cover story of the American Prospect magazine, which asks pointedly: "Are mere pundits responsible when an administration’s policy goes wrong?," and then: "When their sophistic arguments helped sell and sustain it, very." There you are in a caricature with three other pundits who helped cook up the war with your neo-con pals in the Bush administration, the pundits being Charles Krauthammer, Thomas L. Friedman, and Christopher Hitchens. Within the text, Harold Meyerson, a Prospect editor-at-large, throws in a fifth pundit, Victor Davis Hanson, a historian cheerleader for the war at National Review. But as you are the most important of the quintet, he leads off with you, in the following excerpt. [You can read the article in full at the link provided above.]
William Kristol: The Strategist
Since 1998, it’s been Weekly Standard Editor Kristol who’s argued most persistently that getting rid of Saddam Hussein should be the central goal of U.S. foreign policy. So even before the debris of 9-11 had settled, Kristol -- like his longtime neoconservative compatriot Paul Wolfowitz, and, indeed, like the President himself -- saw an opportunity to take the coming war to Iraq. “I think Iraq is, actually, the big unspoken elephant in the room today,” Kristol said on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered the day after the attacks. “There’s a fair amount of evidence that Iraq had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past.”
In the months following the attack, Kristol wrote and spoke about Hussein’s arsenal with exquisite attention to detail, however fictitious those details were to prove. On NPR’s Talk of the Nation that October, for instance, he said, “We know that over the last three or four weeks, he has moved many of his chemical and biological weapons programs in preparation for possible U.S. attacks.”
As intra-administration battles raged among the hawks in the Pentagon and the more cautious voices at the CIA and the State Department, Kristol seized every opportunity to undermine the credibility of those who failed to appreciate that Hussein was the source of all danger. On November 19, 2001, he and his sometimes co-author Robert Kagan wrote, “Iraq is the only nation in the world, other than the United States and Russia, to have developed the kind of sophisticated anthrax that appeared in the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. What will it take for the FBI and the CIA to start connecting the dots here? A signed confession from Saddam?” Whatever else Kristol and Kagan may be, the heirs to Holmes and Watson they are not.
During the war itself, Kristol turned his attention to the shape of a post-Hussein Iraq. Characteristically, he dismissed nettlesome complexities [dot dot dot]
<More Neocons skewered on the barbeque of reality> http://wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=4589 ========