Failing Upward

Bob Harris's website links to this Los Angeles Times article (free registration required) by Robert Scheer appropriately entitled "The Peter Principle and the NeoCon Coup." For those with valid concerns about registering (cookies, and whatnot), here are a few choice paragraphs:

...incompetence begat by ideological blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives who created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than survived the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a peaceful and democratic Iraq under U.S. rule. In fact, despite calls for their resignations — from the former head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, among others — the neocon gang is thriving. They have not been held responsible for the "16 words" about yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of Iraq's munitions stores and the disastrous elimination of the Iraqi armed forces.

As of today, the neocons on Zinni's list of losers — Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz; the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — are all still employed even as Bush's new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, is eviscerating the CIA's leadership.

This is the culmination of a three-year campaign by the president's men to scapegoat the CIA for the fact that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch.

So far, half a dozen of the nation's top spymasters have been forced out abruptly — a strange way to handle things at a time when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are still seeking to attack the U.S. Ironically, this all comes as Goss is suppressing a lengthy study, prepared for Congress by the CIA's inspector general, that, according to an intelligence official who has read it, names individuals in the government responsible for failures that paved the way for the 9/11 attacks...

We should remember that as flawed as its performance was under former Director George J. Tenet, the CIA at least sometimes tried to be a counterweight to the fraudulent claims of Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's neoconservative staffs. All of the nation's traditional intelligence centers were bypassed by a rogue operation based in Feith's Office of Special Plans. Feith was given broad access to raw intelligence streams — the better to cherry-pick factoids and fabrications that found their way into even the president's crucial prewar State of the Union address.

Now, by successfully discarding those who won't buy into the administration's ideological fantasies of remaking the world in our image, the neoconservatives have consolidated control of the United States' vast military power.

With the ravaging of the CIA and the ousting of Powell — instead of the more-deserving Rumsfeld — the coup of the neoconservatives is complete. They have achieved a remarkable political victory by failing upward.

And, off topic, but: Harris, who has more stomach for this kind of stuff than I do, apparently spent some time checking out the lunawingnut reaction to the videotaped shooting of the wounded Iraqi. His comments are pretty much what I was trying to get at myself:

One final point: the soldier in question has at least one defense I can think of, which is ultimately human and understandable, even without condoning what he did. In the midst of a dangerous situation, furious from earlier combat, sleep-deprived, overheated, god knows what all the guy went through... he made a momentary, snap decision, one which he may or may not come to regret for the rest of his life.

OK. That'll all be at the trial and so on. That's one thing.

But the people condoning this sort of summary execution as we speak... words fail me. They have no such defense. Most of them are sitting in comfy chairs enjoying a broadband connection, with all the time in the world to consider moral questions.

And they say killing people in cold blood is A-OK.

I am much more frightened of them than of this particular soldier.