Iraq mea culpas, or "Rats abandon the Bush ship"

Been a while since Ico posts as he has been juggling some labor intensive projects, but he just had to take a moment to comment on a development that is getting little press mention outside of ideopolitical circles and which you won't be hearing about on Rush Limbaugh's radio show any time soon. In case you have not noticed, there has been a notable rush of previously hawkish conservative and neoconservative intellectuals and scholars abandoning their prior party-line stances on Iraq and issuing a stream of tortured mea culpas about the whole affair during recent weeks.

William F Buckley writes, "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed": http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp

Andrew Sullivan confesses his regrets: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1169898,00.html

And neocon scholar Francis Fukuyama has done an abrupt and astounding about-face with a lengthy and unsparing assessment of Bush's overseas misadventures. Here is an excerpt of that Fukuyama article, which Sullivan references above:

{As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.}

This Fukuyama article is about 7 pages in length and can be found here (may require registration): http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=fd873c6fec3d2217&ex=1141966800

My own take is that politics of any stripe, be they those of the libs or of the neocons, no longer matter in this debate. Regardless of the misguided policies and doctrines that put us in Iraq, we are already there now and cannot afford to drop the ball and let things spiral out of control. We must finish the job we rightly or wrongly started.

-I