Commandante Kristol Unholsters His Cap Pistol (updated)
Posted by James Wolcott

...A subtle chap, almost feline, Bill Kristol isn't crass enough to put it that plainly. But he is crass enough to blame on the Iraq debacle on anybody but himself and his fellow samurai at The Weekly Standard.

... on Fox News Sunday he proposed that the reason the U.S. hadn't quashed the insurgency and prevented the prospect of civil war was because the war had never been properly fought or as he put it, waged with "serious...effort." To which Ceci Connolly raised the pertinent question, Then what has the U.S. military been doing for the last three years? Oh no, our soldiers have performed heroically, Kristol said; it was Pentagon policy that let them down, and he specifically mentioned Donald Rumsfeld and his original drawdown plans.

Ah, they're turning on their own. Sweet. Up to a few months ago, Rumsfeld was still a neocon hero--sharp, blunt, visionary. Indeed, the godmother of neoconservatism, Midge Decter (wife of Norman Podhoretz, mother of John), wrote a book-length mash note lauding the former wrestler to the heavens. And now comes the accusation from Kristol that a too-cautious, thrift-conscious Rummy has shortchanged the mission. Thus the CYA revisionism has begun, as the neocons agitate for yet more manpower and firepower to finish the job in Iraq that only they still see as as finishable (in a week in which William F. Buckley diagnosed the Iraq war as a dead duck). Kristol's antiterrorist policy in Iraq was simple and blunt: "Kill them. Defeat them." Of course if it were that simple, it wouldn't be as hard as it's proven to be. We barely have a decent photograph of Zarqawi, much less a bead on his whereabouts. Easy for Kristol to draw a stern line in the avocado dip. But it would be political suicide for Bush to follow such counsel and lift the troop levels in Iraq to crank the war up an aggressive notch: Iraq 3.0: This Time We're Not Dicking Around. Mind you, I'm all for Bush's political suicide, but what's in it for him? Not much and he knows it. He's lost too much political trust and capital, Americans are tired of the war (more tired than the political class and punditocracy), and the military is stretched max. It's too late for a Victor Davis Hanson cavalry charge into the black heart of the Sunny insurgency led by Kristol and his neocon comrades embedded in cable-news green rooms 3000 miles in the rear, cheering, "Kill them! Defeat them!" at the TV monitor in voices loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to disturb Richard Perle napping in his portable coffin...http://tinyurl.com/aky9j
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