Yes, as LNS Foreign Correspondent Dunston Woods, says,
"It's the Consensus vs. the Cabal." And, it is,
indeed, a very broad and deep "Consensus."
Patrick J. Buchanan, WorldNetDaily: The Night of the Long Knives has begun. The military and CIA are stabbing the neocons front, back and center, laying responsibility on them for the mess in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Balkan wars of the American Right have re-ignited, with even the normally quiescent Beltway conservatives scrambling to get clear of the neocon encampment before the tomahawking begins.
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Monday, June 7, 2004
The dog days of the War Party
Posted: June 7, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Fourteen months ago, after the 3rd Infantry Division
and Marines swept into Baghdad, Washington was at the
feet of the neoconservatives who had been plotting and
propagandizing for an invasion for years.
A celebratory breakfast was held at the American
Enterprise Institute think tank, where William
Kristol, Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen held forth
in a spirit of joyous anticipation of wars and
victories to come. At a dinner party at the vice
president's mansion, Kenneth ("Cakewalk") Adelman,
Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and
Paul Wolfowitz toasted one another and the president.
As the '60s song went, "Those were the days, my
friend, we thought they'd never end."
Now, enmeshed in a guerrilla war, Americans are
demanding to know who told us we would be welcomed
with garlands of flowers. Who said our troops would
come home in a year? Who said democracy would flourish
across the Arab world? Who misled us about the weapons
of mass destruction? Who lied us into war?
But the neocons may be facing problems more serious
than entering the history books alongside the Whiz
Kids of the McNamara era who got it wrong in Vietnam
and left 58,000 behind. Some War Party leaders may see
careers cashiered and reputations ruined.
According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence
officials claim that Ahmad Chalabi informed the top
Iranian agent in Baghdad that the Americans had broken
their top-secret code and were reading their messages
to Tehran. Chalabi reportedly told his Iranian contact
he got this intel from a high American official who
was drunk.
According to writer Sidney Blumenthal, the FBI is now
visiting AEI to interrogate scholars in residence – to
learn who leaked word we had broken the Iranian code
to Chalabi, who is emerging as the Alger Hiss of the
neoconservatives.
Another question is whether Chalabi was being used all
along by Tehran to goad the United States into
invading Iraq, thus opening the door to a Shiite
regime in Baghdad, which, with Shiite Iran, might
control the Persian Gulf and its oil treasures in
perpetuity.
If so, this Iranian coup would rank with Bismarck's
doctoring of the Ems telegram to goad Napoleon III
into a war that cost him his throne and
Alsace-Lorraine, and united Germany behind a Prussian
king whom Bismarck would have crowned Kaiser in the
Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
The White House dumping of Chalabi represents a rout
for the neocons, who had all their chips on this pony.
For Chalabi had promised them that, once installed in
power, he would recognize Israel and resurrect the old
Mosul-to-Haifa pipeline.
Another scandal on the back burner that could explode
and spill over before November is the Justice
Department's investigation into the White House leak
of the CIA identity of the wife of former Ambassador
Joe Wilson. That leak was a retaliatory strike on
Wilson for an op-ed in the New York Times that
undermined Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union
Address that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear
weapons in the African nation of Niger.
Apparently, Justice is not only seeking to identify
the leakers, but looking at the possibility that FBI
investigators were misled or lied to. President Bush
has himself hired outside counsel. As ever, it is not
the offense, but the cover-up that ensnares them.
Then there is the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. This
appears to be working its way up the chain of command
toward the E-Ring of the Pentagon and even the West
Wing of the White House. If orders went out to ignore
the Geneva Convention, and prisoners who had nothing
to do with terrorism were abused or tortured, or died
in captivity, famous heads could roll.
Later this summer, the 9-11 Commission reports. It
seems certain to single out Wolfowitz and
administration neoconservatives along the line of
argument of Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" –
for an obsession with Iraq that blinded the White
House to the real and present danger of bin Laden and
al-Qaida.
Beyond this, the national press, cable television and
the Internet are still flush with stories of how, in a
secret Pentagon intel shop, neocons "cherry-picked"
the prewar intelligence and "stove-piped" it up to
Cheney's office, where it was inserted into the
addresses of President Bush.
The Night of the Long Knives has begun. The military
and CIA are stabbing the neocons front, back and
center, laying responsibility on them for the mess in
Iraq. Meanwhile, the Balkan wars of the American Right
have re-ignited, with even the normally quiescent
Beltway conservatives scrambling to get clear of the
neocon encampment before the tomahawking begins.
But a larger matter looms than the cashiering of
ideologues and apparatchiks whose time has come and
gone. If Bush's "world democratic revolution" and "Pax
Americana" are out, what is in?
What is our post-Iraq foreign policy to be? After we
come home from Iraq, how far does retrenchment go? If
the neocons are being stuffed into the Hefty bags of
history, who moves up next?
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Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the
Republican presidential nomination and the Reform
Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and
editor of the new magazine, The American Conservative.
Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated
columnist, he served three presidents in the White
House, was a founding panelist of three national
television shows, and is the author of seven books.