Neo Culpa

Andrew Sullivan

I'm just beginning to absorb the full impact of the fact that Richard Perle and my good friend Ken Adelman have just unleashed a critique of the Bush administration that is as brutal as anything I have been writing for the past three years. Coming from them, it's the equivalent of "no confidence" in the Bush administration. From the neocons. Money quote from Ken:

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself — what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN'T DO. And that's very different from LET'S GO."

Thanks, Ken. You're a patriot. You've told the truth about men whom you know and care about. Because America comes first. And this country and its honor must be rescued from this incompetent cabal.

Update: David Frum responds. Money quote:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

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& flash forward 10.21.2008