Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke. For as he prepares to ‘surge’ 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we ‘are not winning,’ his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations. Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair’s David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war that they, the ‘Vulcans,’ so brilliantly conceived. Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9-11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bushite incompetence that fouled it up. ‘The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless,’ wails Ken Adelman, who had famously predicted in the Washington Post that ‘liberating Iraq would be a […]