Whoa-Cheney's AEI & Republicans turning on each other & Bush

[Pallas180]

Salon mag

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/08/30/neocon_fight/index.html

Aug. 30, 2004 | The Grand Old Party's "big tent" on foreign policy is flapping in tatters. Behind the Republicans' predictable show of Rambo bravado as they gather in Madison Square Garden Monday, they are reeling. The libertarians and isolationists have left in disgust. The respectable traditional internationalists of the James Baker-Brent Scowcroft school are holding their noses and saying nothing, but behind closed doors they are seething. President Bush and his fundamentalist evangelicals have left only the neoconservatives who plunged them into the nightmarish swamps of Iraq. And now even that notoriously disciplined group has gone rogue and is rioting wildly: The neocons have turned upon one another -- and on Bush himself.

The neoconservatives who dominate the civilian echelon in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council understandably remain silent. With their every prediction and assurance about Iraq discredited, there is little more they can do but hope for another war, this time with Iran, that will miraculously sweep away all their problems. It is like betting the second mortgage on red when you have already lost your shirt and the roulette wheel is rigged to turn up black.


Senior neocon administration officials like Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah at Vice President Cheney's right hand; Harold Rhode, the Islamic affairs advisor to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and the Pentagon coteries led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith are lying low in public, as well they might.

-snip-

On Aug. 19, Rubin, formerly a midlevel advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and now at the American Enterprise Institute, blasted Bush, noting that the president cannot escape the tainted legacy of his father. "There is little goodwill left in Iraq," he opined. "The United States government has managed to squander it. Bush may be sincere about his desire for democracy, but to Iraqis, family matters. Iraqis associate the president with his father, who is notorious among Iraqi Shia for his failure to support their March 1991 uprising."

-more-

[homerthompson]

1. excellent, just excellent. let the power grab begin.

since all rethugs are ruthless and are not bound to the rules of decency, it is only a matter of time before they use those devious skills on each other.
no honor among thieves, apparently.