The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup

[Guest guest]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-

scheer16nov16,0,6247007.column

 

Robert Scheer:

The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup

 

The bloodletting has begun.

 

I'm not referring to the latest attempt to reconquer Iraq, but

rather the wholesale political revenge campaign being waged by the

hard-liners in the Bush administration against anybody and everybody

inside the government who challenged the way the second Persian Gulf

war in a decade was marketed and run.

 

Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose political epitaph should

now read, " You break it, you own it " for his prescient but unwanted

warning to the president on the danger of imperial overreach in

Iraq.

 

Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind the scenes, the

White House's unprecedented exploitation of raw intelligence data in

order to sell a war to a Congress and a public hungry for revenge

after 9/11.

 

Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama bin Laden hunter

Michael Scheuer, better known as the best-selling

author " Anonymous, " whose balanced and devastating critiques of the

Iraq war, the CIA and the way President Bush is handling the war on

terror have been a welcome counterpoint to the " it's true if we say

it's true " idiocy of the White House PR machine.

 

Meanwhile, 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.

 

Thus Bush, with Goss as his hatchet man, is having it both ways: He

can be seen to be cleaning house at the CIA — when he is simply

punishing independent voices — while denying Congress access to an

independent audit of actual intelligence failures.

 

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.