I just got a copy of excerpts from an article that will appear in the January issue of Vanity Fair. The article is not scheduled to hit newsstands until December 6, but for some reason — does anyone have any guesses? — Vanity Fair has rushed excerpts out now. In the article, a number of the main advocates of war in Iraq turn on President Bush and accuse him and his administration of bungling the plan for the war. Some quotes from the article:
Richard Perle: “I think that if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’…Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”
Kenneth Adelman (who predicted that victory in Iraq would be a “cakewalk”): I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”